FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF LILIANA'S INVINCIBLE SUMMER AND DEATH TAKES ME
We come from far away and, all of a sudden, we no longer know where we are going.
In Terrestrial, we follow travellers who carry little but longing and a sense of possibility. A woman returns to the town of a lover who once abandoned her, walking its streets listening for an echo. Two girls ride a train in search of a lake that may only exist in memory and myth. A group of workers build a temporary shelter, only to see it razed in an instant.
These characters hitchhike, drift, wander, or at times, fly, to resist the forces that try to contain them. On dusty, sun-baked roads they remain close to the earth's surface, sensing its tremors, its wounds, its wild promise and enduring beauty.
Blending memoir, reportage and fiction, Rivera Garza bends form into something elemental and new, reshaping the boundaries of writing as she tails these young travellers. Terrestrial is a fierce and tender meditation on what it means to move through the world as a woman, on the landscapes that mark us, and our ties to the earth we tread on.
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
PRAISE FOR CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA:
'One of Mexico's greatest living writers' JONATHAN LETHEM
'An explosive writer ... with a powerful style, an evocative and indomitable language' LINA MERUANE
'A masterful storyteller' JENNIFER CLEMENT
Autorentext
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of Death Takes Me, The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir Liliana's Invincible Summer won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD programme in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator, working mainly in the areas of Latin American fiction, essays, poetry, and hybrid texts. She has translated books by such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez, Jazmina Barrera, Clyo Mendoza and Elvira Navarro. She also worked with Cristina Rivera Garza on the translation of Autobiography of Cotton. She has contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published shorter translations, articles, interviews and collaborations on a wide variety of platforms.