April 9th6:30pm
Writing is an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered”, says the Pulitzer-winning poet Carl Phillips. Join us as we delve into the mysteries of the art of storytelling. In this workshop-adjacent book club, we will discuss everything from plot beats to perspective choices to sentence-level sonics of major literary works and small press gems, in an attempt to understand how specific authorial choices shape the experience and impact of a story. You do not have to be a writer to join us — just someone with a deep love for literature and endless curiosity about how a story gets told.
This month we'll discuss Cristina Rivera Garza's dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence, Death Takes Me, translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker.
“Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.”—Yuri Herrera, author of Kingdom Cons
“In writing about Mexican violence, misogyny, natural disasters, pandemics, art and literature, resistance, about Mexican women, US Latinx, and about herself, Cristina Rivera Garza writes about the universal conditions of our world today. She does so with prose unmatched for its sharp intelligence, poetry, clarity, empathy, liveliness, passion. She is a genius, ‘our’ necessary voice.”—Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle
A city is always a cemetery.
A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.
Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.