Awards

• Short-listed for National Book Awards (Translation) 2023

Overview

Full Product Details

9781804270189

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage and has the skill to pull it off.' Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream 'Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O'Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.' Julian Lucas, New York Times 'She isn't holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she's dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find. ... In Melchor's world, there's no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we've made.' -- Juan Gabriel Vazquez, New Yorker 'Time spent with her writing leaves no doubt: the unholy noise she creates is the work of someone who knows exactly which notes to hit.' -- Chris Power, Guardian

‘The result is an absorbing, compassionately rendered portrait of a place, its people and its ills. The stories are punctuated by brief but telling allusions to the material conditions that sustain the moral degradation she describes: police corruption, social security cuts, prison overcrowding, unscrupulous building contractors. Melchor’s macabre aesthetic has shades of gothic horror, but she is a Dickensian at heart.’ — Houman Barekat, Sunday Times ‘Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’ ― Julian Lucas, New York Times ‘Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage and has the skill to pull it off.’ ― Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream ‘Time spent with her writing leaves no doubt: the unholy noise she creates is the work of someone who knows exactly which notes to hit.’ — Chris Power, Guardian ‘Don’t get too hung up on what exactly This Is Not Miami is, though, and you’ll find its world filthy, disquieting and compulsive.’ — Pippa Bailey, New Statesman ‘She isn’t holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she’s dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find. ... In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made.’ — Juan Gabriel Vázquez, New Yorker ‘In addition to bravely presenting dark truths, Melchor writes from a good heart…Melchor makes her point (not without sorrow and gruesome humor), then gets out of the way, so that her subjects can speak.’ — William T. Vollmann, New York Times ‘Melchor isn’t inventing anything in broad strokes…She’s not playing with facts so much as how facts are delivered — oral history, first person, second person, ghost story, legend. A lesser journalist massages details to more perfectly fit a narrative. Melchor is doing something more like the opposite: playing with form to expose the lies, hypocrisies, hatreds and oversights that soften or avoid the reality of human evil. Melchor isn’t claiming to know the whole story. But what she means to say is that we should think twice before we do as well.’ — Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times ‘Skillfully translated by Hughes, this is a book that’s as gorgeous as it is dark, and it proves that Melchor is one of the finest writers working today. Absolutely stunning.’ —Kirkus starred review ‘Melchor resists the seductive burden of explaining the realities (or exaggerations) of such non-European regions in blistering, true-crime detail. Though based on real events, these relatos are decidedly not journalistic, and not even realist. Melchor’s prose blooms under that strange light.’ — Lisa Yin Zhang, Frieze

'Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O'Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.' Julian Lucas, New York Times 'Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage and has the skill to pull it off.' Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream 'Time spent with her writing leaves no doubt: the unholy noise she creates is the work of someone who knows exactly which notes to hit.' - Chris Power, Guardian 'She isn't holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she's dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find. ... In Melchor's world, there's no resisting the violence, much less hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a long, unsparing look at the hell that we've made.' - Juan Gabriel Vazquez, New Yorker

Author Information

Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor is widely recognized as one of the most exciting new voices of Mexican literature. Her novel Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. Paradais, her second novel to appear in English, was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available