Biography
Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning author, translator and critic, and the only two-time winner of the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (2001; 2009). Originally written in Spanish, her works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989. She is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of the PhD in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.
The first of Rivera Garza’s books to be published was The Iliac Crest (2018). The second, The Taiga Syndrome, is forthcoming in 2019.
More Info
- Read an interview with Cristina Rivera Garza in The Millions.
- The Iliac Crest was chosen by Publishers Weekly fiction editor Gabe Habash as one of his six favourite books of 2017:
- Look out for The Taiga Syndrome, forthcoming in 2019!
Reviews
Jonathan Lethem
‘One of Mexico’s greatest living writers.’
Sjón
‘The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza is a dark, daring contemporary fable with echoes from the past. Small, short, covered in gray, it sparkles on the page and dazzles the mind.’
Anna Aslanyan
The Guardian
'A suspenseful fable [that] defies traditional narrative.'
Sarah Gilmartin
Irish Times
Through her powerful command of language, she eases the reader into her nightmarish fairytale.'
Lina Meruane
‘An explosive writer yet to be fully accounted for in English.’
Yuri Herrera
'Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.’
Daniel Borzutzky
‘The contemporary Latin American detective novel is a form that uses the individual’s rollicking quest as a means of resistance against repressive structures and the violences they engender. Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome, in this stellar translation by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, gives English-language readers a lyrically luminous take on the genre while not skimping on its adventurous antics. If The Taiga Syndrome is a book of illness, it’s also about exile, disappearance, borders, love, language and translation, desire, capitalism and its discontents, fairy tales, and what it means to be possessed by the madness of others and the madness of ourselves. The murmurs that haunt the detective in the novel evoke the history of Mexican fiction, most notably Juan Rulfo. But this is not a religious state of purgatory. It’s more like Apocalypse Now fused with the worlds of Clarice Lispector and Jorge Luis Borges. In other words, there is no one writing novels as phantasmagorically exquisite as Cristina Rivera Garza’s. The Taiga Syndrome, which is both quietly poetic and narratively unhinged, is a crucial addition to her distinguished oeuvre.’
Jane Ciabattari
BBC.com
‘Innovative Mexican author Rivera Garza’s dazzling speculative noir novel is narrated by a woman hired to find a man’s missing second wife… As she tracks the mysterious couple over snow-covered trails in the boreal forest, the universe becomes eerie and unpredictable. She encounters a feral boy, a ferocious wolf, earthy villagers and wild lumberjacks. Rivera Garza invokes Hansel and Gretel as she spins her marvellous, atmospheric tale.’
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘This novel, in a translation by Levine and Kana, is taut, lyrical, and strange, and it fits right in with Dorothy, A Publishing Project’s commitment to work that challenges what genres and forms can do. Like the best speculative fiction, it follows the sinuous paths of its own logic but gives the reader plenty of room to play. Fans of fairy tales and detective stories, Kathryn Davis and Idra Novey, will all find something to love. An eerie, slippery gem of a book.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘As lyrical as a poem (“Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity”) and as fantastic as a fairy tale, Rivera Garza’s gorgeous, propulsive novel will haunt readers long after it’s finished.’
Vulture
‘A Lynchian noir from one of Mexico’s best novelists tracks a missing couple in a ravaged no-man’s-land, weaving a mystery out of fairy tales, disaster capitalism, and shadowy afflictions.’
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Los Angeles Review of Books
'Readers of this book will encounter one of the most fiercely original literary voices from Latin America.’
Jonathan Woollen
Politics & Prose
'Mystery, sci-fi, Socratic dialogue, retelling of ‘Hansel and Gretel’: The Taiga Syndrome is a delightful shape-shifter of a novel.’
Mark Haber
Brazos Bookstore
'This insanely creepy & brilliant book by the incomparable Cristina Rivera Garza will keep you awake at night. Garza is a master of atmosphere. A detective novel directed by David Lynch & narrated by Bolaño.’
Sarah McCarry
Tor.com
'Wood, snow, blood: old stories. The witch in the forest, the breadcrumb trail, the grandmother-skinned wolf – everybody’s here, in this wild little book, breath steaming humid in the cold air.’
Veronica Scott Esposito
Literary Hub
'Rivera Garza belongs to the tradition of iconoclastic writers who question why our world has to be the way it is. This is the sort of powerful inquiry that often brings art to its most immersive, rewarding, and generative place. Read her books and explore your own taiga.’
Laura Adamczyk
The A.V. Club
‘In plain, lyrical language, [Rivera] Garza drapes a poetic hush over the narrative, creating an unsettling fable-like world. It’s a mystery that creeps, with careful, steady steps.’
Ploughshares
‘So far so noir, except that this summary, along with every other summary I’ve seen in reviews and copy for The Taiga Syndrome, fails to give an accurate impression of the experience of reading the book. First, the story is nonlinear, not in a Memento kind of way but in a You-realize-time-is-an-illusion-don’t-you? one. What there is in the way of plot – and there is plot here – is dominated by an obsession with language.’
Minor Literature(s)
‘Diaphanously translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, this deceivingly spare, noir fairy tale can be read (devoured) at a sitting, but the subconscious wounds it (in)exacts may fester in one’s non-fiction ever after.’
Literary Hub
'Come for the satisfying sense of utter disorientation, stay for the gangly homunculus that bursts out of the woman’s mouth in the middle of the night.’
Shelf Awareness
'[Rivera] Garza doesn’t stop with fairy tales, however; she inverts traditional tropes from any number of genres to great effect. The subject of the mystery is not the crime or even the victim, but the detective. The unreliable narrator reports on her own unreliability.’
Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Enigmatic. . . . a joy to behold.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘Rivera Garza’s novel succeeds as a suspenseful psychological horror story in the vein of a David Lynch film or Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, as a dissolver of the space between genders, and as a challenge to the cultural erasure of the real-life Dávila. The result is mind-bending.’
Samantha Hunt
‘Like the ocean itself, Cristina Rivera Garza writes a world where borders shift and dissolve. In the curves of the fantastic, the highest realism is born. This world is weird. This world is so deeply true. I love this wholly perfect book.’
Yuri Herrera
‘An intelligent, beautiful story about bodies disguised as a story about language disguised as a story about night terrors. Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.’
Latino Book Review
‘Cristina Rivera Garza fills every chapter with suspense and nonstop mystery. Nonetheless, the plot is not centred in resolving these mysteries, but rather, it provides the reader a mind-bending journey filled with symbolism and a reality that follows its own rules of logic’
The Millions
‘One of the most fascinating novels I’ve read in years—utterly weird yet deeply resonant in its portrayal of gendered violence.’
The Riveter
‘Symbolism abounds in the book; again, there great depths one could dig through, and The Iliac Crest could easily be read over and with new discoveries. Garza’s writing is gorgeous and precise, tying the various aspects of the book together into what is, at its core, a strange and unforgettable read.’
Shelf Awareness
'Although modest in length, Garza's creative piece is a complex puzzle that might take multiple readings to unravel fully... Despite the novel's brevity, Booker's translation makes clear the intricate and delicate poetic dance Garza crafts among the three main characters.'
Music & Literature
'The Iliac Crest carries out a sophisticated, dynamic inquiry into language, gender, and power, and leaves its readers transformed by its lyrical investigation of what it means to inhabit a body.'
Center for the Art of Translation
'[A] haunting, brilliant novel'
The Quarterly Conversation
'It seems to contain a multitude of novels, exploring a multitude of realities, experienced simultaneously. The result is exhilarating.'
Elena Poniatowska
‘A key work of Mexican literature.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Rivera Garza’s taut language drives the mystery forward, and she plays cleverly with the literary and political histories of Mexico, the importance of queer visibility, and the silencing of female authorship. An existential gothic tale about the high stakes of understanding—and accepting—the self.’
Christian Lisseman
Big Issue in the North
‘[Playing] with issues of gender, insanity, violence against women and life at the borders . . . this is an engaging, haunting story about what it is to name and be named.’
Kirstyn Smith
The Skinny
‘Garza has a flair for describing intense pleasure . . . blur[ring] the line between sanity and insanity. . . in this fever dream of a story.’
Lina Meruane
‘Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer yet to be fully accounted for in English. An insubordinate stylist, a skilled creator of atmospheric and haunting language, The Iliac Crest is a willfully queer piece where the workings of her wild imagination destabilize everything.’