With stolen cash and tickets booked through a shady travel agency, Marlon Cruz and his girlfriend, Reina, have smuggled themselves out of Colombia and into the United States. But on their first night in New York City, they lose each other, and Marlon finds himself cast into the city's immigrant underworld, alone. As he searches for Reina in the bars and boarding houses where illegals congregate, the story of their harrowing cross over the border is retold, mapping the arc of a relationship that has transformed him into a reluctant immigrant.

Paradise Travel: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

FRANCO,JORGE

Contemporary

Picador

From one of Colombia’s leading novelists, a tragicomic story of unrequited love and a view of New York through the wide eyes of an illegal immigrant Paradise Travel recounts the adventures of Marlon Cruz, a naïve young man from Medellín, Colombia, who agrees to accompany the beautiful, ambitious woman he loves to New York. On their first night in Queens, Marlon and Reina lose each other, thus initiating Marlon’s descent into the underbelly of our country. A leader of the gritty-realist movement known as McOndo, Jorge Franco evokes the follies and pains of unrequited love at the same time that he explores deeper inequalities between North and South America. Moving between lower-middle-class Colombia and immigrant New York (specifically, the Jackson Heights neighborhood seen recently in the movie Maria Full of Grace), Paradise Travel is an exciting work from a rising star, celebrated by Gabriel García Márquez as “one of those to whom I should like to pass the torch” of Colombian fiction. Praise for Rosario Tijeras: “Latin America’s McOndo literary movement drags the butterflies of magical realism into Burger King. With Jorge Franco’s narco-saga Rosario Tijeras, it may have found its first masterpiece.” —Rachel Aviv, Salon

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

"Since they shot her at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of love with that of death." Rosario Tijeras is the violent, violated character at the center of Jorge Franco's study of contrasts, set in self-destructing 1980s Medellín. Her very name-evoking the rosary, and scissors-bespeaks her conflict as a woman who becomes a contract killer to insulate herself from the random violence of the streets. Then she is shot, gravely wounded, and the circle of contradiction is closed. From the corridors of the hospital where Rosario is fighting for her life, Antonio, the narrator, waits to learn if she will recover. Through him, we reconstruct the friendship between the two, her love story with Emilio, and her life as a hitwoman. Rosario Tijeras has been recognized as an admirable continuation of a literary subject that was first treated by Gabriel García Márquez and then by Fernando Vallejo. A work in the Latin American social realist tradition, Rosario Tijeras is told in fast and vibrant prose and with poetic flourish.

Rosario Tijeras: A Novel

Literary

Seven Stories Press

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2020 Translated Lit &#12539;Big Other Expertly told by one of Latin America's most exciting voices, Shooting Down Heaven follows the children raised by 1990s Colombia's most dangerous drug cartels and the consequences that shape their adulthood.&nbsp; After twelve years away, Larry comes home to his native country of Colombia after his father, an old associate of Pablo Escobar, is murdered. Larry returns to collect his remains from a mass grave and give him a proper burial...but not before a reunion with his childhood friend, Pedro. Pedro picks him up at the airport to take him directly to the Alborada celebration--a popular festival where fireworks explode over Medellín, and the entire city loses its inhibitions. This is where Larry's story really begins. His long-awaited homecoming quickly becomes a rude awakening. The years of luxury living in bodyguard-surrounded mansions are now firmly in the past, as Larry watches his family--including his ex-beauty queen mother and troubled brother--fall deeper into depression, drug addiction, and the traps of the family business. Faced by an uncertain reality, Larry is forced to confront his family's turbulent history and reclaim himself from the dark remnants of a city still trying to rediscover itself. Unflinching and remarkably controlled, Jorge Franco creates a stunning portrait of a generation wounded by their parents' mistakes.

Shooting Down Heaven

Europa Editions

The Outside World takes place in Medell n. There, time is wrapped in a mist, and voices seem like whistles that get lost among tree branches. A castle-like structure stands watch in the overgrown outskirts of the city, and a blond girl runs out the door. Eyes watch, captivated by this unusual presence, and the girl disappears into the forest. It is 1971, and this girl's father, don Diego, has been kidnapped. El Mono is the leader of the crime ring, whose intention is to demand a million-dollar ransom from the family. El Mono has reasons aside from economics to kidnap don Diego: a romantic obsession with the man's daughter, Isolda, a blonde princess whose father, a devotee of Wagner's operas, has kept her locked in the "castle" to preserve her purity and avoid sullying her with the crude outside world that surrounds them.

El mundo de afuera / The Outside World (Spanish Edition)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Alfaguara

Una apasionante novela sobre la generación de hijos de los grandes narcotraficantes colombianos de los años noventa y un fiel retrato de la Medellín de hoy. Larry regresa al país doce años después de la desaparición de su padre, un mafioso muy cercano a Pablo Escobar en los años noventa. Sus restos han sido finalmente hallados en una fosa común y Larry vuelve para recuperarlos y darles sepultura. A su llegada a Medellín lo espera Pedro, su gran amigo de infancia, que se lo llevará directamente desde el aeropuerto a la celebración de la Alborada, una fiesta popular en la que la ciudad pierde el control mientras estalla pólvora durante toda una noche. El encuentro de Larry con su madre, una antigua reina de belleza que pasó de tenerlo todo a no tener nada, y que ahora se halla sumida en la depresión y la drogadicción; los recuerdos de un pasado familiar turbulento y el redescubrimiento de una ciudad en la que aún se perciben los rezagos de la época más oscura de la historia de Colombia, son algunos de los hilos que conectan esta novela en la que el autor –con la maestría narrativa que lo caracteriza- consigue retratar a una generación de hijos del narcotráfico, que terminaron por ser víctimas de sus propios padres." ENGLISH DESCRIPTION A thrilling novel about the generation of children of the major Colombian drug lords of the ‘90s, and a true portrait of Medellín today. Larry returns to the country twelve years after the disappearance of his father, a mobster who was close to Pablo Escobar in the 1990s. His remains have finally been found in a mass grave, and Larry is returning to reclaim them and give them a proper funeral. He is picked up at the airport by Pedro, his childhood friend, who takes him directly to the Alborada celebration, a popular festival at which the whole city loses control while fireworks burn all night. Larry’s encounter with his mother, a former beauty queen who went from having it all to having nothing, and who is now sinking in depression and drug addiction; the memories of a turbulent family history; and the rediscovery of a city in which you can still see remnants of Colombia’s darkest times are some of the threads interwoven in this novel. The author, with the narrative skill he is known for, manages to portray a generation of drug lords’ children, who end up being victims of their own parents.

El cielo a tiros / Shooting Down Heaven (Narrativa Hispanica) (Spanish Edition)

Dramas & Plays

MUNDO DE AFUERA, EL

Rosario Tijeras (Polish Edition)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

W.A.B.

El mundo de afuera (Premio Alfaguara de novela)

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