Cristina Rivera Garza, one of Mexico's most important contemporary authors, is progressively gaining renown in the U.S. (where she's lived since 1989) and has won a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2020 National Book Critics Circle finalist nod in Criticism. Indie press Dorothy's release of New and Selected Stories, which gathers 30-plus years of intriguing work, gives English-speaking readers access to Rivera Garza. Sarah Booker, who also translated Rivera Garza's The Iliac Crest, leads the translation team, which includes Francisca González Arias, Lisa Dillman, Alex Ross and Rivera Garza herself.
The collection's four parts retain their original Spanish titles: the first three sections were previously published, the fourth is a collection as yet unpublished in Spanish. In Part I's "La Guerra no importa" (War Doesn't Matter), Rivera Garza's main character in both "Unknowing" and "Like Bitches, Like She-Devils" is a woman named Xian, who recounts an overnight encounter with an abandoned lover in the former and who becomes the victim of a kidnapping in the latter. Xian returns, at least in name, in "The Last Sign" in Part III, La frontera más distante (The Utmost Border), in which she becomes a missing object-of-sorts for "the Man Who Swore He Had Lost a Woman from China." An unnamed Detective also recurs through numerous stories--searching but never quite finding.
Gender disparity, violence, migration and disorientation are a few of the recurring themes throughout this collection; Rivera Garza's presentations invite continued interpretations and investigation. As if aware of her stories' lingering, puzzling effects, Rivera Garza presciently summarizes, "We have shared the unintelligible together. We are kin now. We will never be alone." --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon