Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. She has published over a dozen novels, two of which were designated the Best Novel Published in Mexico by the prestigious magazine Reforma--her second novel, Before, also won the renowned Xavier Villarutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel; and her novel La otra mano de Lepanto was also selected as one of the Top 100 Novels Published in Spanish in the past 25 years. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award, and was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award. Boullosa has received numerous prizes and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship. Also a poet, playwright, essayist, and cultural critic, Boullosa is a Distinguished Lecturer at City College of New York, and her books have been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian. Peter Bush is an award-winning literary translator of Spanish, Catalan, French, and Portuguese from the UK. A former director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, Peter became a professor of Literary Translation at Middlesex University and later the University of East Anglia.
A ghost story told by the ghost herself. It's Boullosa's first major novel--her first real novel--originally written in the 1980s when she was a well-known poet in Mexico City and was worried that she would be lost as a poet if she started in on prose... it's the first of the many strange masterpieces she's written in the three decades since. But while her later work tends towards baroque and postmodern explorations of strange new linguistic worlds--future utopias and lost historical archives--this first novel is raw and unadorned, like a vein opened up on the page. -- Aaron Bady, Literary Hub, Thirteen Books to Read in June