New and Selected Stories

by Cristina Rivera Garza, Sarah Booker (Translator), Lisa Dillman (Translator)

“The stories in this collection are as varied as Rivera Garza’s remarkable career, and this book is an excellent introduction to a unique writer who deserves to be recognized not just in Mexico, but all over the world.”—Kirkus, starred review

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018 about Cristina Rivera Garza, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant for fiction that “interrogates culturally constructed notions of language, memory, and gender from a transnational perspective,” as well as the José Donoso Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

New and Selected Stories brings together in English translation stories from across Rivera Garza’s career, drawing from three collections spanning over 30 years and including new writing not yet published in Spanish. It is a unique and remarkable body of work, and a window into the ever-evolving stylistic and thematic development of one of the boldest, most original, and affecting writers in the world today.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

238 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 12, 2022

About the author

Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989. She is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Houston and was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2020.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m coming around to the view that Cristina Rivera Garza is one of the most vital writers working today. Her work exploring the transience of identify, the limitations of language, and the erasure of the female experience is both timely and necessary. These and other themes are powerfully explored in her full-length fiction and nonfiction works, my personal favorite being The Iliac Crest. For CRG aficionados, Dorothy, a publishing project, has curated this collection, New and Selected Stories, a collaborative work between Rivera Garza, translator Sarah Booker, and others. This collection is hard to assess, in part because it is, by design, uneven: we see snatches of her themes repeated through stories, many of which shadow her longer works. For me, the collection was less of a pleasure read and more of a resource, a compendium that allowed me to understand her longer works in a broader context. I came away from this with more appreciation for her longer fiction and an awareness for how it is in conversation with cross-genre works like El invincible verano de Liliana. For anyone new to CRG, I wouldn’t recommend starting here. I would probably explore her nonfiction and longer fiction, then dip into this collection for a richer and more immersive experience.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection represents a kind of retrospective of the work of Cristina Rivera Garza, presented in chronological order with pieces stemming from the early nineties to the present day. These are enigmatic, challenging works that demand an active, responsive reader. There are shifts in theme and focus but all reflect Garza’s sense that “reality is convoluted, troublesome, problematic, horrific, and above all enigmatic;” and often display traces of her most significant literary influences from Don DeLillo to Juan Rulfo and Marguerite Duras.

Two atmospheric stories from La Guerra No Importa explore the lives of working-class women in Mexico City through a young, female drifter Xian, whose chance, yet intimate, encounters expose the dangerous deceptions of love and romance. Extracts from Ningún Reloj Cuenta Esto demonstrate Garza’s concerns about increasing violence against women, the gendered societies and forms of masculinity that enable and foster women’s objectification. The stories taken from La Frontera Mas Distante venture further into the realms of the fantastical, including eerie accounts of colonial oppression and othering that threaten to tip over into existential horror. Yet despite their elusive flavour, these narratives are more explicitly politically engaged: drawing on anthropology, history and real-world events: from women’s resistance to oppression through the creation of Nushu, a private language shared by excluded women in China’s past; to the impact of Chernobyl and wider forms of environmental disaster. Short pieces from Diminutus bring together many of Garza’s recurring themes and preoccupations: ecological blight, gendered violence and femicide; the experience of living in the shadow of authoritarian, militaristic regimes.

Garza’s stories tend to have an uncanny feel, often suffused with a dream-like, hallucinatory logic that’s led to frequent comparisons with the work of people like David Lynch. Although she also grounds much of her later work by deploying more conventional genre tropes associated with speculative fiction or noirish, detective narratives. I often found her work disorientating but it was equally gripping and provocative; and I admired her willingness and her ability to experiment with different forms and styles, the almost casual inclusion of elements from other texts from academic theory to drama and poetry. These are stories I'll definitely revisit. Translated here by Sarah Booker with additional translations by Lisa Dillman, Francisca Gonzalez Arias and Alex Ross. This also includes an invaluable introduction and overview written by the author.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Dorothy Project for an ARC

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

We walk like bitches, we walk like she-devils with this heavy loneliness on our shoulders.

This is a retrospective, a collection of stories - and yet could almost be seen as a fragmented version of long-form fiction where the broken apart pieces reflect the bodies and psyches of the characters who inhabit these uncanny places.

I find CRG's writing mesmerising: febrile, brittle, crackling with import and power. Characters weave through these elusive pieces - the restless Xian, a nameless Detective, a female journalist who disappears in The City of Men (what city isn't?) though traces of her can be found.

These stories are enigmatic but they feel purposefully so as they return compulsively to key beats: violence against women, what it means to live under military and cultural oppression, unstable identities, and the power of language, writing and storytelling.

The imagery is potent, penetrating, and the stylistics of CRG's prose mean I could read her sentences forever - stunning writing and a seething gendered and politicised consciousness make this one of my books of the year.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive retrospective of Cristina Rivera Garza's short fiction to date, this book brings stories into English from four of her published collections with a few bonus uncollected pieces. For those who have read and enjoyed Rivera Garza's novels—particularly The Iliac Crest and The Taiga Syndrome—there is much here to sate your appetite for her gauzy, unstable narratives pockmarked with mystery and menace. Above all, the stories from La frontera más distante share a kinship with the maddeningly alluring vagueness of those two novels. Always tantalizingly out of reach, what lurks beneath Rivera Garza's fiction tends to stay there, though we come to recognize familiar themes rising as curls of smoke: the effects of patriarchy, gross authority, and various forms of war on people, often women; the perils of investigation into the former; the experience of outsiders (looking in, attempting to pass, being drawn in); the crossing of borders; and the intricacies woven into the act of writing. Though her fiction can often be described as stripped down, at least in terms of typical narrative trappings, it also delivers finely wrought passages such as this one, where everything seems to be said in sensory terms without need for explication—one feels the text as a song thrumming in one's chest:

A bird is a message. A form of writing on the page of the sky. An excuse to lift your eyes and get lost in dark, oscillating thoughts. Another way of moving across the horizon. Black ink. Red ink. White ink. The melancholy that subtly overcomes. The pain that provokes the closeness of the distant, another way of saying this is impossible. A caricature. A metaphor. That which is in place of. A pair of post-historic wings. The beak that rips apart. The roundness of the unblinking eye. Dirty, the feathers. Footsteps on sand or in memory.

More thoughts and discussion here.

[Mak · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oookei eg er 1 million % for dum for det her, på den andre sida er eg ikkje så forbaska dum at eg er diskvalifisert frå å meine noko. Og denne boka.. den er uleselig. Eg prøvde virkelig, men det er som å bli forklart nokons feberdrømmar. Nei, det er som å bli forklart fortalt om nokons feberdrømmar frå ein tredjepart som snakkar røvarspråk. Det kokar i blodet av å tenke tilbake på timane eg las dette, forvirra og fortapt i ein labyrint av anti-setningar. Siste del skumma eg berre, og alle novellene såg grusomme ut. Eg har mest lyst til å kaste eksemplaret eg lånte i elva, i eit forsøk på å spare andre frå å oppleve dette her.

Denne opplevelsen blir med meg livet ut, sånn sett vinner du Garza din djevel

(Las den norske omsettelsen "Ikke med meg", mikroskopisk unntak frå slakten for tre av novellene: "Ingen klokke forteller dette", "Pascals siste sommer" og "Dagen da Juan Rulfo døde")

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, US & Canada

Before choosing my destiny, I had read about them. A strange book, half history and half legend. A book from a library in the city. I read it immoderately, as I used to do in those days. With the moistened tip of my index finger perpetually poised to turn the page, I forgot to eat. I only stopped occasionally to get a drink of water, but I never actually drank it; as soon as I put the rim of the glass to my lips, I would become distracted again. Something urgent called to me from across the room, and I answered the call. Before closing the book, I had already made up my mind: I would leave that place—that kitchen, that library, that city. I would become someone else. One of them. It’s difficult to explain why one does the things one does. But everything happened just like it does in books: I left that place, and, almost without a plan, I showed up in a small village where they needed men. I put on my new clothes and committed myself to a life of celibacy. And they, who were so few, bowed their heads when I passed.

New and Selected Stories is a collection of translated work by Cristina Rivera Garza, spanning 30 years of the author's career, assembled and mainly translated by, Sarah Booker, in conjunction with the author and publisher, also including translations from Alex Ross, Lisa Dillman, Francisca Gonzales-Arias and the author herself.

Sarah Booker discussed with the author the assembly of the work, which was prepared specially for English publication, at the Southwest Review. Interestingly, Rivera Garza took the opportunity to revisit and revise some of the stories, including those previously translated, an example being the excellent idea she and Booker had to add lines from Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation of Pedro Páramo to the story “The Day Juan Rulfo Died”:

I embraced the writers I have been, as they have been. I did not want just to republish the stories, but neither did I want these versions to betray the energy or desire that triggered them in the first place. And this is a tough act, one at once uncomfortable and intriguing. I wanted to be un-finishing these stories, unlocking their now-time, making them aware of the present that was invoking them.

The collection was commissioned and published by Dorothy Project:

Dorothy, a publishing project is an award-winning feminist press dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or writing about fiction.

Each fall, we publish two new books simultaneously. We work to pair books that draw upon different aesthetic traditions, because a large part of our interest in literature lies in its possibilities, its endless stylistic and formal variety.

The press is named for its editor’s great-aunt Dorothy Traver, a librarian, rose gardener, animal lover, children’s book author, and bookmobile driver who gifted her niece books stamped with an owl bookplate.

This is the first original from Dorothy Project I've read but they are the US publisher of several books I've read in their UK editions, notably the brilliant translations of a trilogy of 'near fiction' by Natalie Leger, The White Dress, Exposition and Suite for Barbara Loden, published in the K by Les Fugitives, Joanna Walsh's Vertigo as well as the author's own The Taiga Syndrome, the latter two both UK published by And Other Stories.

Rivera Garza's stories have not previously been published in English other than in magazines and anthologies, but this collection (the opening story aside, whose provenance isn't stated) draws on four collections in the Spanish-language original, which the author discusses in her introduction:

La guerra no importa (1987) - "I conceived of the tales in that book as links in a larger arc whose gravitational centre was Mexico City as experienced by working class young women yearning for freedom ... a novel of sorts: tense, loosely interconnected, about to unravel";

Ningún reloj cuenta esto (2002) - inspired by the increasing wave of femicides and other gender troubles that were becoming prominent at the time;

La frontera más distante (2008) - here I was delighted, as it is one of my go-to literary references, to see the author reference the Todorovian fantastic as the basis for these stories (in his words as translated by Richard Howard "The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event”), and this collection is closest to The Taiga Syndrome in style also featuring Rivera Garza's signature Detective character; and

Diminutus (in progress and not published in Spanish) - "a collection of short stories and speculative fiction".

In terms of the collection we get only two works each from the earlier collections, and I didn't feel I was really therefore able to appreciate the overall theme of each work. The pieces from Diminutus felt like loosely connected fragments of a wider work, although that does suit the author's style - from her interview with Booker: The more I write, the more I realize I am, in fact, writing a single, continuously branching, deeply interrelated piece.

Much my favourite of the collections featured was La frontera más distante, with seven stories, and my particular favourites were:

- The Last Sign - which features the recurrent Qian character from La guerra no importa as well as The Detective, and so felt the most 'signature' work.

- City of Men, which rather like the Taiga Syndrome, is pieced together from reports read after the event sent from a female journalist who goes on assignment to the eponymous city and never returns, the story relayed with headings such as: The report that the Editor-in-Chief would eventually receive and read, while sitting by the phone, recounted:

- Carpathian Mountain Woman. This takes its epigram and a recurrent refrain from Sun, by Michael Palmer, from the collection: Codes Appearing: Poems 1979 - 1988:

Write this. We have burned all their villages. Write this. We have burned all their villages and the people in them. Write this. We have adapted their customs and their manner of dress.

And the quote that opens my review is drawn from that work.

Overall - this is an impressively assembled collection although, and despite increasingly becoming a short-story fan, I prefer the author's novels, and, as a 30-year compendium, not all pieces work as well as others. Close to 5 stars at it's best (the three stories I highlight) but 3.5 stars overall.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily in my top 5 (if not top 3) for short story collections. The only regret I have is giving up Spanish in high school, because I would have loved to read this in it's original language.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Buddy read with S̶e̶a̶n̶ (and possibly Vavita and Whitney). Join us! More notes here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Marc · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this because it's put out by Dorothy and it was their longlisted submission for the inaugural U.S./Canada version of the Republic of Consciousness prize (entire longlist here: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...).

I liked maybe the first two or three stories, thought about the first third of the book was okay, and struggled with the last 160+ pages. I just never really clicked with the writing. I absolutely loved Garza's The Taiga Syndrome.
------------------------------------------------
My Longlist Rankings for the U.S./Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize
1) Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán
2) A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse
3) Moldy Strawberries: Stories by Caio Fernando Abreu
4) Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing by Robin McLean
5) God's Children Are Little Broken Things: Stories by Arinze Ifeakandu (Prize Winner)
6) The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr
7) New Animal by Ella Baxter
8) Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce Padilla
9) Pollak's Arm by Hans von Trotha
10) New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza

[Claire Hopple · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garza is a master of suspended suspense.
Characters resign themselves to unknowing and inaction, gazing out windows and lowering their gazes, complicit in torpor with fate itself. Personhood takes the shape of monolith shrouded in mercurial, ominous humidity. There, we anticipate. We’re still anticipating a grand tabula rasa.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, I loved this book.
I loved the way she approaches gender. She seems to share the views of William Burroughs and Rachel Cusk that women and men are altogether different species.
I loved the way that she plays with language and form (some of them read like prose poems), but never in a dry, boring way. The writing seems to be moving in a slightly cut-up, collage-y direction perhaps (I kept thinking about that M. John Harrison line about how you can tap a sentence and it will fall into it’s components, you tap it the next day and it falls into different components), but she never loses sense or dynamism. She uses that collage technique (Not the right word, I know. What is she doing? You can see it in the Rothko stories particularly because it’s happening right in front of you. She’s breaking it up, isn’t she? I kept thinking of passages on cards. The stories could work, some of them, as cards in a box) and it adds energy and momentum, with just a slight, exciting hint at randomness.
I loved the apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic or pre-apocalyptic vibe of the final stories, with the sense of a slow running down of civilisation, the sense of something terrible that's about to happen or has already happened.
Overall, I enjoyed the flavours of gothic doom-iness mixed with romantic, sexy passion. It’s a winning combination.
Word of advice, perhaps skip the first Yoko Ono story. Infact, read the stories in back to front order.
I’ve read this twice already, and Autoethnography with the Other I cant stop re-reading.
I need to get some other books by this woman.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

She is, simply put, the most important living writer on our planet. Even above my god, Cesar Aira. This book felt like a tease. Each story belies a novel; each collection, some idea too big to ever fit into the cornices of a book. It could only be more perfect if it were longer. If you were, like me, especially taken with the stories about the City of Men, then I highly recommend checking out the work of Renee Gladman.

[Eamonn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good stories (unknowing, Pascal's last summer and city of men), others that were enjoyable and some that I didn't really like/get.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really wonderful collection of stories! The stories covered many themes and styles but often had a dreamlike quality to them. As I read I often felt like I wished the stories were longer. I'm eager to explore more of Cristina Rivera Garza's longer work.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this book of short fiction while traveling in Mexico and sad to say I didn't *get* it. The pieces are beautifully written but they're so vague and ethereal and under-explained, and it seemed to be much more about the Vibes than what was happening on the page. Alas. Perhaps would be better with a class.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange and wonderful!

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous set of stories. Full of magical realism, cultural and physical violence. Incredible narrative play

[Grason Poling · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is immensely creative and exciting. i want more

[Siel Ju · Rating 4 out of 5]

Say you’re a woman, and a writer. On an assignment you’re sent to a city in which only men live. Your job: To report on this city from a female perspective. Except not long after you arrive, you discover there were women who preceded you, women who also were sent to this city for the express purpose of reporting on it from a female perspective, but never did, because they disappeared.

This story, City of Men, is one of my favorites by Cristina — but many in this collection are similarly moody, mythical, vaguely sinister, and strange. Though she’s a MacArthur Genius Grant-winning, highly decorated Mexican author, I’d never heard of Cristina until I chanced by this book at a store. The stories span 30 years of her publishing career and many on the latter end tend heavily toward the experimental, made up of short, poetic lines and quirky flarf-like fare. The farthest out of these, to be honest, were not my favorite. But I know the stories that grabbed me will haunt me for a long time.

[غبار · Rating 4 out of 5]

something so elemental & crystalline & cutting about rivera garza's writing (and sarah booker's translations), the way she appears able to distill everything into gazes, hands, touches, fleeting scents, elusive impressions, and yet somehow conjure the sense that the writing itself is a map (formed perhaps by cracks across the ceiling – an image that recurs across numerous stories) that sees & knows, that triangulates, out of sight; at this point i'd read anything she writes and there aren't many writers i'd say that about. my favourites from here were the stories from part III: la frontera mas distante, which felt closest in tone & sensibility to the novels of hers that i've loved (the figure of the Detective, the women's secret language, the sudden disappearances of bodies). those from part IV were a little more hit-or-miss for me, briefer & perhaps more experimental, often extending the plotlines & worlds of previous texts.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the books on the inaugural longlist for the US and Canada RoC award. It is composed of a collection of stories taken from works by Garza (a Mexican author) not previously published in English. There is a forward by the author that is very helpful in appreciating the collection. I very much enjoyed it, with the last section that has the shortest stories. As the author states in the forward, she repeats themes and characters, so you could make a case that these are "linked" short stories. I read this in audio so it was impossible to directly compare stories. To do the book justice, I need to obtain it in print. But, still I enjoyed it. Definitely worthy of the longlist pick and I would not be disappointed to see it on the shortlist.

[Scott Radway · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book probably shouldn't hit 4 stars from me -- for one thing, there were entire stories I didn't really follow, or was too impatient to re-read and really dig into. Half the time I didn't necessarily know what was going on. Yet I was never bored, absorbing Garza's style in the hopes that eventually there would be an 'ah hah' moment on my part. That never came, yet for some inexplicable reason I also feel there is a lot to grasp here if one takes the time. This is a collection I feel likely to revisit in an attempt to crack its code. So for that, I say bravo.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is this book? Honestly I’m not sure. A difficult and sometimes mesmerizing text. A jumpy thing that springs back to the places it sketched before, villanelle-like. A subversive and deeply feminist text. A death text. An anti-colonial text. Always searching the evidence, the signs, the feel of a place/time while also questioning if we really believe in anything. (Thud) That’s me hitting the floor.

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

we know and we know until the bliss of forgetting all. the world has made it so easy to disappear. this had strings of sentences i could not believe were etched together such as "there is pleasure--pure pleasure, simple pleasure--within a head" or "a demand: I want my perceptions to change me" or "and this is a cartwheel. all the insects are dead"

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Are there Cliff Notes for this book? It's almost impossible to decypher the intent or context behind these stories. With short stories you have to quickly make a connection with the reader on the purpose, background, or trajectory. These stories have none of the above.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag. Some more accessible than others. I don't feel I grasped them. I lack the literacy to get most of them. But there were a few enjoyable ones, nonetheless.

It's a mood.

[ASC Library]

863.64 Gar

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Love is this, Xian, contriving lies and deeply believing them."

[Lara · Rating 4 out of 5]

FAVORITE STORY: “City of Men”