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About the Author

Yuri Herrera, currently writer-in-residence in the Spanish-Portuguese Department at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he teaches writing, was born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970. He 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, was published to critical acclaim in 2015 and was included in many Best-of-Year lists.

In New York on May 4, 2016, Herrera and his translator Lisa Dillman won the Best Translated Book Award for Fiction for the novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World. Although Herrera is not a new author (his first work was published in Spanish in 2004), his brilliant literary achievements are only recently available to English speakers without a good reading grasp of Spanish. The event recognizes not only the genius of an author in his/her native language but the art of the translator, with prizes of $5,000 each for author and translator. Three Percent, an online resource for international literature based at the University of Rochester, presents the translation awards each year. The group takes its name from the estimated percentage of books published annually in the U.S. that are works in translation. The cash prizes are funded by the Amazon Literary Partnership program. The Best Translated Book Awards event has become an annual literary highlight, shining an important spotlight on great international works which deserve to be introduced to U. S. readers.

Despite the prevalence of Spanish-language authors published in translation—who have made the BTBA longlist—Yuri Herrera is the first Spanish-language writer to win the award for fiction. According to BTBA judge Jason Grunebaum, “Translator Lisa Dillman has crafted a dazzling voice in English for Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, a transformative tale of a young woman’s trip on foot from Mexico to the U.S. to deliver a package and find a brother. This novel of real pathos and unexpected displacement in self, place, and language achieves a near perfect artistic convergence of translator and author.”

With all of the stupidly bombastic political promises to build a high wall on the border between the U. S. and Mexico, the work of Yuri Herrera should be required reading for all U. S. citizens, especially those who believe that an expensive wall would turn out to be any kind of solution,  anything, in fact, other than an expensive blight on the landscape of the border, a maintenance nightmare, and a monument to 50 years of failure by the U. S. government, beginning with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to win the war on drugs. As “El Chapo” and colleagues have stated on a number of occasions:

“Go ahead and build the wall. What do we care. We have tunnels.”

Herrera’s latest novel, published in English in July, 2016, is The Transmigration of Bodies, also translated by Lisa Dillman. Both novels are available today from Faulkner House Books in a single volume.  Later this month, he will be awarded one of Germany’s top prizes for
literature, the Anna Seghers Prize, by the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

About the Translator

lisa-dillmanLisa Dillman, translator of works by Herrera, including both novels and short stories, is based in Atlanta, GA, where she translates Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American writers and teaches at Emory University. Her recent translations include The Frost on His Shoulders by Lorenzo Mediano, Op Oloop by Juan Filloy (longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award), Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World by Sabina Berman and Rain Over Madrid by Andrés Barba.

Praise for The Transmigration of Bodies

In his new novel, “The Transmigration of Bodies,” Herrera pivots from border fabulist to noirish raconteur, bringing his considerable allegorical powers to bear on another facet of contemporary Mexican culture: Namely, its legacy of violence. A mysterious plague is ravaging an unnamed city. While its terrified inhabitants cower indoors, two ruling crime families — the Castros and the Fonsecas — trade body blows on the newly empty streets. “So different and so the same,” we are told of these neo-Capulets and Montagues, “poor as dirt a couple decades ago, now too big for their boots.” When Castro’s daughter and Fonseca’s son turn up dead, the city thrums with retaliatory tension. Enter the man known only as the Redeemer, a damaged Winston Wolf-like fixer whose “talent lay not so much in being brutal as in knowing what kind of courage every fix requires.” He is hired by Dolphin, the capo of the Fonseca clan, to initiate an exchange of bodies while mitigating the chance of further reprisals. “This ain’t about revenge,” Dolphin says, “just about getting even.
—Dustin Illingworth, The Los Angeles Times

There is something bracingly un-bookish about the Mexican writer Yuri Herrera’s two short novels. His acclaimed debut novel in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was about a woman from a small Mexican town braving the traffickers and vigilantes of the border to track down her brother in the U.S. It left you feeling more as though you’d participated in a feverish “curandero” rite, or sat through a particularly gripping Iñárritu movie, than read a novel. Its spare, deliberately estranging descriptions – the opposite of the tropical lushness you’d find in Carlos Fuentes, say, or Robert Stone – placed you in its heroine’s precarious situations with unnerving immediacy. Occasional use of a made-up patois (inventively translated by Lisa Dillman)
added to the feeling of reality being imagined from the ground up.
. . . The Transmigration of Bodies is nine parts noir to one part post-apocalypse fantasy. There are running motifs of shuttered pharmacies, face-mask shortages, power and water failures, and there are a couple of menacing encounters with militias, but in general the story owes more to Raymond Chandler than Mad Max. Its plot follows the standard gumshoe formula of zigzagging excursions through the city’s mean streets and sinister interiors, where the point isn’t so much the mission itself as the occasions it offers for displays of stoic heroism, erotic danger and authorial wit.

James Lasdun, The Guardian
 
Praise for Signs Preceding the End of the World
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera confirms his status as a storyteller skilled at creating intense storylines and using original language. It is as adept at depicting wretched conditions as it is of elevating the humble and everyday to symbolic dimensions. And that symbolism, to be sure, has something of the Kafkaesque.
—Arturo García Ramos, ABC
It’s fair to say that Yuri Herrera follows in the footsteps of compatriot Juan Rulfo, perhaps the master par excellence of creating limbos, spectral spaces in which the characters—real Schrödinger’s cats—reside halfway between the living and the dead.
—Javier Moreno, QuimeraThe book amazes with the precise and persuasive beauty of its words. New words are created or transformed in order to tell what cannot be told.
—María José Obiol, El País
Herrera’s great achievement lies in elevating the harsh epic of “crossing” to the “other side” to soaring myth. There are allusions to Odysseus, Orpheus and the Styx, the river of Greek mythology that was a border to the Underworld; as well as Mesoamerican stories of shapeshifting and rebirth . . . Herrera’s metaphors grasp the freedom, and the alarming disorientation of transition and translation . . . Translator Lisa Dillman has found a language both blunt and lyrical for Herrera’s many neologisms.
—Maya Jaggi, The Guardian
Short, suspenseful . . . outlandish and heartbreaking.
—John Williams, New York Times
. . . In this legend-rich book, to immigrate is to enter forever the “land of the shades.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

The narrative invites reflection on the migrant experience and cultural difference; it also supplies the excitement of an adventure with gangsters, guns and false leads . . . Yuri Herrera combines a dreamlike setting with vigorous style.
—Anthony Cummins, Times Literary Supplement

Yuri Herrera is Mexico’s greatest novelist. His spare, poetic narratives and incomparable prose read like epics compacted into a single perfect punch – they ring your bell, your being, your soul. Signs Preceding the End of the World delivers a darkly mythological vision of the U.S. as experienced by the “not us” that is harrowing and fierce. The profoundly dignified, mind-boggling Makina, our guide and translator, is the heroine who redeems us all: she is the Truth. 
—Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name

Yuri Herrera must be a thousand years old. He must have travelled to hell, and heaven, and back again. He must have once been a girl, an animal, a rock, a boy, and a woman. Nothing else explains the vastness of his understanding.
—Valeria Luiselli, author of Faces in the Crowd

Herrera never forgets the turbulent and moving humanity of his protagonist: adroit, angry, ineluctable, Makina is destined to become one of the essential characters of Mexico’s new literature . . . Herrera creates a radically new language . . . and condenses into a few pages what other authors need hundreds to convey.
—Jorge Volpi, author of In Search of Klingsor

Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World is a masterpiece, a haunting and moving allegory about violence and the culture built to support and celebrate that violence. Of the writers of my generation, the one I most admire is Yuri Herrera. 
—Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles

…the nine short chapters tell a very straightforward quest story, and Herrera plants dangerous criminals and vigilant border patrolers around every corner. But it’s the imagery, by turns moving and nightmarish, that makes this brief book memorable . . . This is a haunting book that delivers a strange, arresting experience.
Publishers Weekly

This is a gravity greater than earth’s norm. Incidents, phrasings that suggest the novel could shift to another realm continue. They are pregnant with potentiality, and tension of potentiality is one of life’s great pleasures, even, especially, in the discomfort that comes with it. It creates only one of the ways that Signs Preceding the End of the World holds you in rapture . . . Signs is a novel of language, meant to be translated because it is so aware of the journeys language takes, from one to another, and within their boundaries.
—P.T. Smith, Bookslut

This is a gorgeous, crisp little thing….although no epic—accounting for chapter breaks it clocks in at under 100 short pages —Yuri Herrera has managed to achieve such extraordinary scope, of space and meaning, without any sense of hurry or clutter . . . is an important work, given the tenor of the immigration debate in the US and internationally. Herrera and Makina make a mockery of old-order American patriotism, which is easy to do but tough to actually pull off. The whole book is in fact a tiny exercise in bold and clever writing done with verve.
Angus Sutherland, The Skinny

A short, brutal, urgent missive of a book . . . Herrera’s prose, as translated by Lisa Dillman, has some of McCarthy’s doomy intonations, his terse impressionism, and his obvious debts to Beckett, Hemingway, and Faulkner . . . There’s the same nervy hovering around the edge of allegory and never quite committing to the jump. And the landscape, of course, is the same . . . But Herrera is—well—better . . . Herrera writes literature. Signs Preceding packs a fractal complexity into its furiously concentrated sentences; it’s slangy, impish, iterative, slightly manic even at its saddest. Herrera has everything McCarthy doesn’t: humour, kindness, politics that don’t stink.
—Pete Mitchell, The Quietus

Yuri Herrera is one of Mexico’s proudest literary exports, and his Signs Preceding the End of the World . . . reads like scripture, the received words of an all-knowing wise man.
—Jane Graham, The Big Issue

It might be a re-telling of the Odyssey at the Mexican border.
—Janet Potter, The Millions

Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of those rare volumes that manages to explore language in a new way, tell a compelling story, and create memorable characters all at the same time . . . The author’s immense talent is evident in each page, in just about every sentence of the novel . . . The author employs language and a literary perspective you won’t soon forget, his images haunting like a dream. 
—Alina Cohen, The Rumpus