NOVELA GANADORA DEL PREMIO LITERARIO DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2021.

Un matrimonio en crisis viaja en coche con sus dos hijos pequeños desde Nueva York hasta Arizona. Ambos son documentalistas y cada uno se concentra en un proyecto propio: él está tras los rastros de la última banda apache en rendirse al poder militar estadounidense; ella busca documentar la diáspora de niños que llegan a la frontera sur del país en busca de asilo.

Mientras el coche familiar atraviesa el vasto territorio norteamericano, los dos niños, sentados en el asiento trasero, escuchan las conversaciones e historias de sus padres y a su manera confunden las noticias de la crisis migratoria con el genocidio de los pueblos originarios de Norteamérica. En su imaginación, estas historias se entremezclan, dando lugar a una aventura que es la historia de una familia, un país y un continente.

Desierto sonoro, tercera novela de Valeria Luiselli, combina lo mejor de dos grandes tradiciones literarias, la del viaje y la del éxodo: trasiega por el asfalto y atraviesa horizontes desérticos, se detiene en moteles de carretera y penetra en los territorios íntimos de sus personajes, ofreciendo con precisión una serie de instantáneas que retratan las infinitas capas del paisaje geográfico, sonoro, político y espiritual que conforman la realidad contemporánea. Un relato conmovedor y necesario que muestra la fragilidad con que se definen los lazos familiares, indaga en la manera en que documentamos nuestras existencias y pasamos las historias de generación en generación, y se pregunta qué significa ser humano en un mundo cada vez más deshumanizado.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2021.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:

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“An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood. . . . This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post

In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way. A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city’s subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before; his friendships with Nella Larsen and Federico Garc+!a Lorca; and the young woman in a red coat he saw in the windows of passing trains. As the voices of the narrators overlap and merge, they drift into one single stream, an elegiac evocation of love and loss.

Valeria Luiselli’s debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

“Impossibly smart, full of beauty, heart and insight . . . Everyone should read this book.”–Tommy Orange

From the two-time NBCC Finalist, an emotionally resonant, fiercely imaginative new novel about a family whose road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border–an indelible journey told with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity.

A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.

Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something,answers his father.

In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an “immigration crisis”: thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained–or lost in the desert along the way.

As the family drives–through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas–we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure–both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.

Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today.

Includes a PDF of visuals from the book.

A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the US.

Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear-both here and back home.

“Humane yet often horrifying, Tell Me How It Ends offers a compelling, intimate look at a continuing crisis-and its ongoing cost in an age of increasing urgency.” -Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books

“Valeria Luiselli’s extended essay on her volunteer work translating for child immigrants confronts with compassion and honesty the problem of the North American refugee crisis. It’s a rare thing: a book everyone should read.” -Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

“Tell Me How It Ends evokes empathy as it educates. It is a vital contribution to the body of post-Trump work being published in early 2017.” -Katharine Solheim, Unabridged Bookstore

“While this essay is brilliant for exactly what it depicts, it helps open larger questions, which we’re ever more on the precipice of now, of where all of this will go, how all of this might end. Is this a story, or is this beyond a story? Valeria Luiselli is one of those brave and eloquent enough to help us see.” -Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company

“Appealing to the language of the United States’ fraught immigration policy, Luiselli exposes the cracks in this foundation. Herself an immigrant, she highlights the human cost of its brokenness, as well as the hope that it (rather than walls) might be rebuilt.” -Brad Johnson, Diesel Bookstore

“The bureaucratic labyrinth of immigration, the dangers of searching for a better life, all of this and more is contained in this brief and profound work. Tell Me How It Ends is not just relevant, it’s essential.” -Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore

The story of “Highway” Sanchez–bon vivant, world traveler, auctioneer–and his teeth is like Johnny Cash meets Robert Walser in Mexico.

“I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I’m grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Euripides Lopez Sanchez, was given to saying, is character forming.”

Gustavo “Highway” Sanchez Sanchez is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the “notorious infamous,” like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf.

Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, The Story of My Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli’s own literary influences.