Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner): A Sister's Search for Justice

A haunting, unforgettable memoir about a beloved younger sister and the painful memory of her murder, from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem). &nbsp; I seek justice, I finally said. I seek justice for my sister. . . . Sometimes it takes twenty-nine years to say it out loud, to say it out loud on a phone call with a lawyer at the General Attorney's office: I seek justice. September 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. "My name is Cristina Rivera Garza," she wrote in her request to the attorney general, "and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990." It's been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend--and Cristina knows there is only a slim chance of recovering the file. And yet, inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, she embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana's Invincible Summer is the account--and the outcome--of that extraordinary quest. &nbsp; In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Following her decision to recover her sister's file, Rivera Garza traces the history of Liliana's life, from her early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man, to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before. &nbsp; Using her remarkable talents as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence--handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana's loved ones--to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.

Rivera-Garza, Cristina

Parenting & Relationships

Hogarth

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK&nbsp;* "A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister's murderer to justice years after the fact" (The Boston Globe), from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem). &nbsp; "Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza's chronicle is both personal and political."--The Washington Post A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, She Reads October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. "My name is Cristina Rivera Garza," she writes in her request to the attorney general, "and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990." It's been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana's Invincible Summer is the account--and the outcome--of that quest . In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her sister's history, depicting everything from Liliana's early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before. Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence--handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana's loved ones--to document her sister's life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.

Random House Publishing Group

La Castañeda Insane Asylum is the first inside view of the workings of La Castañeda General Insane Asylum--a public mental health institution founded in Mexico City in 1910 only months before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. It links life within the asylum's walls to the radical transformations brought about as Mexico entered the Revolution's armed phase and then endured under succeeding modernizing regimes. Author Cristina Rivera Garza brings the history of La Castañeda asylum to life as inmates, doctors, relatives, and others engage in dialogues on insanity. They discuss faith, sex, poverty, loss, resentment, envy, love, and politics. Doctors translated what they heard into the emerging language of psychiatry, while inmates conveyed their personal experiences and private histories through expressions of mental suffering. The language of pain--physical and spiritual, mild to excruciating--allowed patients to detail the sources and consequences of their misfortune. Available now for the first time in English, this edition contains updated sources and features a note by the translator, Laura Kanost. &nbsp;

La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico

Literature & Fiction

Literary

The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation (Critical Mexican Studies)

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays in this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as the center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality—a term used by anthropologist Floriberto Díaz to describe modes of life of Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor—permeating all writing processes.\nDisappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities from which it grew. In a world rife with violence, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

Essays & Correspondence

Vanderbilt University Press

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays in this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as the center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality--a term used by anthropologist Floriberto Díaz to describe modes of life of Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor--permeating all writing processes. Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities from which it grew. In a world rife with violence, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

Fairy tale meets detective drama in this David Lynch-like novel by a writer Jonathan Lethem calls "one of Mexico's greatest...we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer." Fiction. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana. A fairy tale run amok, THE TAIGA SYNDROME follows an unnamed female Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple who has fled to the far reaches of the earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down�that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation betrays both sense and one's senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective's quest, though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well. That sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.

The Taiga Syndrome

United States

Dorothy, a publishing project

On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator’s house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host’s identity. While the women are strangely intimate―even inventing a secret language―they harass the narrator by repeatedly claiming that they know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. As the increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity, he eventually finds himself in a sanatorium. 
 Published for the first time in English, this Gothic tale destabilizes male-female binaries and subverts literary tropes.

The Iliac Crest

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Cooking Education & Reference

The Feminist Press at CUNY

Este libro es para celebrar el paso de Liliana Rivera Garza por la tierra y para decirle que, claro que sí, lo vamos a tirar. Al patriarcado lo vamos a tirar. «El 16 de julio de 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, mi hermana, fue víctima de un&nbsp;feminicidio. Era una muchacha de 20 años, estudiante de arquitectura. Tenía años tratando de terminar su relación con un novio de la preparatoria que insistía en no dejarla ir. Unas cuantas semanas antes de la tragedia, Liliana por fin tomó una decisión definitiva: en lo más crudo del invierno había descubierto que en ella, como bien lo había dicho Albert Camus, había un invencible verano. Lo dejaría atrás. Empezaría una nueva vida. Haría una maestría y después un doctorado; viajaría a Londres. »La decisión de él fue que ella no tendría una vida sin él. Hace apenas un año decidí abrir las cajas donde depositamos las pertenencias de mi hermana. Su voz atravesó el tiempo y, como la de tantas mujeres desaparecidas y ultrajadas en México, demandó justicia. »El invencible verano de Liliana es una excavación en la vida de una&nbsp;mujer brillante y audaz&nbsp;que careció, como nosotros mismos, como todos los demás, del lenguaje necesario para identificar, denunciar y combatir la violencia sexista y el terrorismo de pareja que caracteriza a tantas relaciones patriarcales». "¡Enorme!&nbsp;¡Ojalá millones lo lean!" -- Francisco Goldman, autor de Monkey Boy, finalista del Premio Pulitzer de Ficción 2022 ENGLISH DESCRIPTION A haunting, unforgettable memoir about a beloved younger sister and the painful memory of her murder, from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem). &nbsp; Can you enjoy yourself while you are in pain? The question, which is not new, arises over and over again during that eternity that is mourning. &nbsp; In the early hours of July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana's story instead became subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice. &nbsp; In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome-but possessive and short-tempered-man, through the exhilarating weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before. &nbsp; Using her remarkable talents as a scholar, novelist, and poet, Cristina Rivera Garza returns to Mexico after decades of living in the United States to collect and curate evidence --handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, architectural blueprints-- in order to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Tracing the full arc of their childhood and adolescence in central Mexico, through the painful and confusing years after Liliana's death, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister, and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.

El invencible verano de Liliana / Liliana's Invincible Summer (Premio Pulitzer) (Spanish Edition)

PRH Grupo Editorial

Winner of the Mexico National Novel Prize, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and IMPACT Prize
Joaquin Buitrago, a photographer in the Castaneda Insane Asylum, believes a patient is a prostitute he knew years earlier. His obsession in confirming Matilde's identity leads him to explore the clinics records, and her tragic history. He discovers that she was a peasant adopted by a doctor uncle. She led a calm life until Cástulo, a young revolutionary chased by the authorities, finds shelter in her home. Matilde's eyes are opened to the social upheaval will lead her to break with her uncle and hide out with Diamantina Vicari. Diamantina's death devastates Matilde so much that she wanders about, completely lost, doing all kinds of jobs, including prostitution. As the photographer discovers more details, he becomes convinced that he and Matilde should live together. Ultimately, as they face defeat in a repressive society, they search to establish in the rubble an uncertain future that will somehow restore their freedom.

No One Will See Me Cry (Lannan Translation Selection Series)

Curbstone Books

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism By one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers, this investigation into&nbsp;state violence and mourning&nbsp;gives voice to the political experience of collective pain. Grieving is a hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. Drawing together literary theory and historical analysis, she outlines how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking--culminating in the misnamed "war on drugs"--has shaped her country. Working from and against this political context, Cristina Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistanceagainst state violence, and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience. She states: "As we write, as we work with language--the humblest and most powerful force available to us--we activate the potential of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing." "A lucid, poignant collection of essays and poetry. . . . deeply hopeful, ultimately love letters to writing itself, and to the power of language to overcome the silence that impunity imposes." --New York Times Book Review "For all the losses tallied, the pieces are imbued with optimism and an activist's passion for reshaping the world." --The New Yorker

Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country

History

Americas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rivera-Garza, Cristina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rivera-Garza, Cristina

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rivera-Garza, Cristina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner): A Sister's Search for Justice

Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner): A Sister's Search for Justice

La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico

The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation (Critical Mexican Studies)

The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation (Critical Mexican Studies)

The Taiga Syndrome

The Iliac Crest

El invencible verano de Liliana / Liliana's Invincible Summer (Premio Pulitzer) (Spanish Edition)

No One Will See Me Cry (Lannan Translation Selection Series)

Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country