Three Novels. Kingdom Cons / Signs Preceding the End of the World / The Transmigration of Bodies

The Mexico we hear of in the news―the drug cartels, migration and senseless violence―is rich soil for Herrera’s moving stories of people who live in this reality but also live in the timeless realm of myth, epic and fairy tale, such as the singer Lobo in Kingdom Cons who loves the drug lord’s own daughter, Makina who crosses borders to find her brother in Signs Preceding the End of the World, and the Redeemer, a hard-boiled hero looking to broker peace between feuding families during a pandemic in The Transmigration of Bodies.

These three novels get to the heart of the matter in a truly original way. They are storytelling that is at once timely and timeless.

Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, Yuri Herrera studied Politics in Mexico, Creative Writing in El Paso and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award after publishing to great critical acclaim in 2015, when it featured on many Best-of-Year lists, including The Guardian’s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books. His second novel The Transmigration of Bodies (2016 in English) and Kingdom Cons (2017 in English) were also published to acclaim, including the Dublin Literary Award (former Impac prize) shortlisting of The Transmigration of Bodies. He currently teaches at the University of Tulane, in New Orleans. A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire is his fourth book, and his first of non-fiction.

Lisa Dillman has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Some of her recent translations include Rain Over Madrid, Such Small Hands and The Right Intention by Andrés Barba and Yuri Herrera’s four books. She won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. She teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.