Cristina Rivera Garza

The terrestrial globe was glowing with a soft, tremulous, bluish light. It’s no bigger than a football, one of us said in surprise. A football left by a child in the solar system. When we meet Julia O’Bradeigh in Belfast, we are transported across the world and back in time; The wind and rain clears, the skies brighten, and we are in Delicias, Mexico. This is the first of many journeys in Terrestrial, a meditative series of linked stories following the travels of a handful of young women through the fringes of Mexico and the United States. As they journey along dusty roads and though chaotic cities, we witness the dangers they encounter, and how they combat them – from dressing as men to navigating male advances together. But we also join in their glory: the wild promise they feel from the earth’s surface, and the wonder of what there is to explore. Touching on themes of climate change, capitalism, class struggle and migration, Terrestrial asks whether you can ever belong to a place that you’re not from, and whether we truly appreciate the gifts of time and space. Bold and intrepid, Terrestrial is the latest masterpiece from Pulitzer-winning author Cristina Rivera Garza, about the deepest ties we hold to our surroundings, and to each other.

Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME‘Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory’ Layla MartinezA city is always a cemetery.When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man ina dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’ After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025

En la lista de los mejores libros del 2025 de: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire «La novela es densa y el ptica, un paisaje on rico con una poderosa resaca ...]. Una] desgarradora y laber ntica obra maestra. -Katie Kitamura, The New York Times «Cu date de m , amor m o / cu date de la silenciosa del desierto . Este verso de Alejandra Pizarnik aparece escrito con esmalte de u as en la pared de un callej n, junto al cad ver mutilado de un hombre. La primera en descubrirlo es la profesora Cristina Rivera Garza. Tras avisar a la polic a, es interrogada por una detective en homicidios que le pide examinar la fotograf a de la escena del crimen. Al reconocer de inmediato el verso, la profesora se convierte en informante clave del caso. Pronto aparecen nuevas v ctimas junto a otros poemas, lo que apunta a un asesino en serie. La detective comienza una lista de sospechosos, mientras que la profesora recibe la primera nota siniestra de alguien que las est acechando. Publicada por primera vez en 2007, La muerte me da es una novela visionaria y emocionante. Escrita por la ganadora del premio Pulitzer y una de las voces literarias m s relevantes en el mundo hispano, Cristina Rivera Garza, esta historia pone en jaque los t picos tradicionales de la novela policiaca y nos devuelve, como un espejo, preguntas inquietantes sobre el deseo y la muerte. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION New York Times Notable Book of 2025 From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence. "Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors' Choice) A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire A city is always a cemetery. A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: "Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert." The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city. Originally written in Spanish, where the word "victim" is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor's classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence. "Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors' Choice) A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ESQUIRE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A city is always a cemetery. A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: "Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert." The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city. Originally written in Spanish, where the word "victim" is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor's classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

In 1934, a young Jos Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers' strike in Estaci n Camar n, which became the basis of his landmark novel Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents' journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas's life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border. Through archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers' strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations. Deeply personal and politically acute, Rivera Garza crafts a new kind of border novel that tells how a brittle land radically altered her grandparents' lives and the territories they helped develop. An intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.

«Leer Terrestre es sobrevolar parajes sobrecogedores e inestables, que son tambi n los territorios movedizos de la memoria, sabiendo que todos los caminos se recorren una sola vez y que "todo se est despidiendo siempre de cualquier manera". Aqu el viaje es el v nculo y tambi n la forma, y Terrestre transita el deseo, la rebeld a, la a oranza y el tiempo con recursos que enfrentan al lenguaje con su potencia pol tica y su abismal intensidad. Lo que hace Cristina Rivera Garza en cada libro es prodigioso. Liliana Colanzi Terrestre bien podr a ser definido como un libro de cr nicas especulativas o relatos de viaje, en todo caso, de palabras en completa libertad. Imaginativo, con estructuras narrativas audaces, Cristina Rivera Garza escribe aqu sobre trayectos terrestres que nos llevan a distintos lugares de M xico y el mundo, y a distintos destinos del cuerpo. A pie, en bus o en tren, las j venes protagonistas de estas historias avanzan acompasadas por rutas ignotas, inventando para s nuevos modos de ocupar los espacios negados y en disputa. Ganadora del Premio Pulitzer por El invencible verano de Liliana, Rivera Garza nos regala un libro extraordinario sobre la amistad, la juventud y el poder de la transformaci n. Terrestre es un libro mercurial, solar, donde el viaje es el arrojo, la concentraci n infinita. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION "To read Terrestre is to soar over surreal and unstable landscapes, which are also the shifting sands of memory, knowing that we travel all roads only once and "are forever saying goodbye in one way or another." Here, the journey serves as both the connection and the medium; Terrestre leads us through desire, rebellion, longing and time with tools that challenge language and its political implications. Cristina Rivera Garza accomplishes prodigious things in all her books." Liliana Colanzi Terrestre is perhaps best defined as a book of speculative chronicles or travel accounts, told with complete freedom of language. Cristina Rivera Garza employs imagination and unique narrative structures to relate journeys around Mexico and the world, and to different parts of the body. On foot, by bus or train, the young protagonists of these stories travel uncharted paths, forcing them to invent new ways to occupy forbidden or disputed spaces. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Liliana's Invincible Summer, Rivera Garza gifts us an extraordinary book about friendship, youth and the power of transformation. Terrestre is mercurial and fearless.

«Verde Shanghai es una novela que apuesta por la libertad en el fondo y en la forma. -Eduardo Antonio Parra Un choque automovil stico da comienzo a la historia de Marina y su alter ego, Xian. La primera tiene una vida dedicada al hogar y a su marido, mientras que Xian es una mujer misteriosa y libre, que encarna la resistencia y los m s profundos deseos de Marina. Verde Shanghai, m s que un caf de chinos, es el umbral donde ambas realidades coexisten y se revelan en libertad. A partir de noticias, cartas y relatos, Marina inicia una b squeda de las m ltiples posibilidades del yo y la identidad que la llevar a descubrir los secretos de su otra personalidad. En estas p ginas el lector encontrar las huellas de otra obra de Cristina Rivera Garza, La guerra no importa, que conforma el universo de Verde Shanghai en una suerte de caleidoscopio que, seg n por donde se le mire, ser el significado y la lectura que se revele. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION "Green Shanghai is a novel that advocates freedom in substance and form." -Eduardo Antonio Parra The story of Marina and her alter ego, Xian, starts with a car crash. While Marina's life is dedicated to taking care of her husband and their home, Xian is enigmatic and free, the embodiment of resistance and of Marina's deepest desires. The border between their realities is Green Shanghai, a caf where the two coexist and can be revealed. Through news, letters and stories, Marina searches for the many facets of ego and identity that lead her to the secret of her other personality. In these pages, the reader will recognize traces of another book by Cristina Rivera Garza, La guerra no importa, which forms the backdrop for Green Shanghai. The result is a kaleidoscope of meanings and the act of reading that reveals them.

Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME‘Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory’ Layla MartinezA city is always a cemetery.When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man ina dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’ After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025

«Modesta parece tener dificultad para fijar su atenci n en los objetos del mundo, pero por donde quiera que camina lleva toda la luz del manicomio sobre la cabeza. Una corona. Tiene frente a su c mara fotogr fica a la interna del manicomio Modesta Burgos, una mujer que le parece familiar. Sobre el banquillo de los locos, ella posa con sorpresiva altivez. Joaqu n Buitrago no demora mucho en recordarla, es una de las mujeres del burdel La Modernidad a la que hab a retratado a os antes. Ahora, despose da de todo, a n conserva el im n que lo atrae. Obsesionado por su historia, busca hacerse de su expediente m dico, «debe haber algo m s en el silencio de su vida , se dice el fot grafo. Publicada en 1999, Nadie me ver llorar es una de las novelas m s relevantes de la literatura hispanoamericana contempor nea, en la que ya brilla el talento de su autora para conjugar con maestr a el archivo hist rico, la narrativa y la imaginaci n. Aqu , la ganadora del premio Pulitzer 2024, Cristina Rivera Garza, recupera la experiencia de Modesta Burgos, una mujer que, a pesar de haber sido internada a la fuerza en el manicomio La Casta eda a inicios del siglo XX, en la ciudad de M xico, siempre conserv su furia cr tica, una inconfundible voz propia y su libertad. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Winner of the Mexico National Novel Prize, Sor Juana In s de la Cruz Prize, and IMPACT Prize. Joaqu n 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. Joaqu n and Matilda begin to tell each other fragmented stories about a past they almost shared, and a future in which they do not believe. Set in 1920s Mexico, this novel is at once an overview of one of the most turbulent times in Mexican history, a love story, and a meditation on the ways in which medical and popular language define insanity. No One Will See Me Cry is a lyrical and startling visitation with the so-called losers of an era as they try to plumb the meaning of their lives.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence."Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors' Choice) A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Lit Hub, The AV Club A city is always a cemetery. A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: "Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert." The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city. Originally written in Spanish, where the word "victim" is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor's classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

The second annual Alchemy Lecture brought together five artists, thinkers, and writers who proposed new ways of being and discussed radical visions for the future. Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World captures and expands these lectures to illuminate our path toward this possible beautiful world. Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) asserts that “for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Film curator Janaína Oliveira (Brazil) evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality. Visual artist Phoebe Boswell (UK/Kenya) asks, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next?” Saidiya Hartman (US) prompts us to consider our capacity to burn, examining whether “the gift of pragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” Cristina Rivera Garza (US/Mexico) gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, “the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.” Each alchemist is intimately concerned with this cargo, our ability to bear its weight, and how we might find the beautiful world together.

The second annual Alchemy Lecture brought together five artists, thinkers, and writers who proposed new ways of being and discussed radical visions for the future. Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World captures and expands these lectures to illuminate our path toward this possible beautiful world. Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) asserts that “for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Film curator Janaína Oliveira (Brazil) evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality. Visual artist Phoebe Boswell (UK/Kenya) asks, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next?” Saidiya Hartman (US) prompts us to consider our capacity to burn, examining whether “the gift of pragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” Cristina Rivera Garza (US/Mexico) gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, “the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.” Each alchemist is intimately concerned with this cargo, our ability to bear its weight, and how we might find the beautiful world together.

Ikke med meg er en novellesamling som spenner over 30 år av Garzas forfatterskap. Novellene varierer i oppbygning og tematikk, og omhandler kjærlighet, identitet, hukommelse, begrensning og grenser. Garza er spesielt opptatt av grensene mellom menneske og stat, og kropp og politikk – hva skjer når disse stadig blir svakere?Felles for de 22 fortellingene i samlingen er at de viser Garzas stilitstiske teft, og hennes overbevisning om at språk er makt – og at hvordan man forteller en historie, eller gjengir historien, kan være livsviktig. Novellene i Ikke med meg er modige og originale, og gir en god introduksjon til et meget unikt forfatterskap.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIRA 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTA NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME AND NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Meticulously written and deeply moving . . . A triumph’ JACKIE KAY‘Absorbing and poetic’ ECONOMIST‘Full of tenderness and beauty’ MARIANA ENRIQUEZFrom one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary writers, an astonishing work of non-fiction that illuminates an epidemic of femicide in Mexico through the death of one woman.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.On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide.She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master's degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him.Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence – handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints – to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister’s voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - "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). "Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza's chronicle is both personal and political."--The Washington PostA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, She Reads, Electric LitOctober 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.