Indie press Dorothy's release of New and Selected Stories, which gathers 30-plus years of intriguing work, ensures English-speaking readers enhanced access to Rivera Garza ... Transparent understanding, definitive endings, convincing closure won't be found here; what Rivera Garza offers is invention, challenge, linguistic acrobatics and a more-than-occasional embrace of the impenetrable ... Rivera Garza's presentations invite continued interpretations and interrogations.
... [Rivera Garza's] work, which reads like a hybrid of reportage and Juan Rulfo's haunted fiction, wriggles into the cracks between emotions. Her most recent stories, especially, are full of the spooky, drifting sensation that sets in at some stage of processing loss: not quite fury, not quite sorrow, but the sense of a new and possibly permanent void ... Sarah Booker, Rivera Garza's longtime translator, handles the majority of the stories here, and does so beautifully ... Not many writers, regardless of fluency in their target language, are ruthless enough to self-translate. Rivera Garza is ... frankly, once you get used to the New and Selected Stories' eerie strangeness, it's hard to pick a favorite, or convince yourself to set the book down.
The primary tension in Rivera Garza’s fiction—between the unruly intensities of sexual desire and the political disciplining of the body—is at its most concentrated in the latest translation of her work ... Knowing and touching: these are the axes on which Rivera Garza’s fiction turns, with a certain predictable steadiness. Yet her single-mindedness is offset by the lure of her fractured forms, her gnomic sentences, and her fairy-tale settings ... The conceptual cunning of Rivera Garza’s stories cannot account for the passion that warms them.
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 ... A fine collection, chilling and frequently bizarre in all the best ways.
English-language readers finally have the chance to enter into the beguiling, menacing, and strangely poignant world that one of Mexico’s best writers creates through her short stories ... The consistently high quality of all the translations makes apparent not only the changes in Rivera Garza’s themes and style but also the way that the stories share an urgent search for meaning and connection ... Unfamiliar languages and uncanny spaces frustrate this search, and Rivera Garza’s frequent narrative distance and detached tone refuse easy intimacy. In its place lies a guiding tension between the desire to belong and an unsettling awareness of inhabiting landscapes defined by isolation, cruelty, prejudice, and catastrophe. Because they impede identification, the stories succeed at placing their characters and readers in similar states of disorientation. This in turn piques the reader’s interest and intensifies the characters’ desire for companionship and a place to call home.
... hypnotic, riveting ... The author successfully deploys a range of styles and forms, influenced by prose poetry, fables, and postmodern experiments. Throughout, she documents the ravages of the real world while establishing a refuge in literature ... These unsettling yet deeply approachable stories ought to earn Rivera Garza the wider attention she deserves.
