| We’re thrilled to say that we will be joined by acclaimed, award-winning Mexican author, screenwriter, columnist and translator, Aura García-Junco who will be discussing her brilliant third novel, May God Blast the Woman Who Writes About Me. The novel is Aura’s first to be translated into English. This is a rare opportunity to hear from a writer who was recently named as one of Granta magazine’s 25 most outstanding young fiction writers in the Spanish language.
7pm, Tuesday 4th June, Gloucester Road Books
Here’s more on the novel from publisher, MTO Press:
“In May God Blast the Woman Who Writes About Me, Aura García-Junco’s third novel and the first to be translated into English, the ‘protagonist’ inherits approximately 10,000 books from her father, the eccentric teacher, underground writer and cultural promoter H. Pascal, after his death, and it is through her (re)connection with this library that she decides to investigate both her fractured relationship with him and her own relationships with literature, materiality and society. This familial archaeology ultimately serves as both a ritual of mourning and as the celebration of a life lived through and because of the written word.
“Heather Cleary’s inspired and remarkable translation guides us through the narrator’s radical explorations of generational change, inheritance, personal libraries, feminism and the ideological tension that it can create between fathers and daughters, self-publishing and ‘outsider’ art that all parade through these pages, in a story that oscillates between distance, fury, happiness, humour and reconciliation.”
Reviews:
‘Although [described] as a hybrid text somewhere between an essay and a memoir, the way [this novel] explodes in front of readers’ eyes makes it so that it doesn’t only surpass that ubiquity (…) but also exceeds those constraints and becomes a novel that paints a portrait of the growth and conflicts between generations, as well as the encounters and disagreements between fathers and their children, and, above all, about illusions and disillusions, hopes, failures, love and grief.’ Emiliano Monge, El País
‘Aura García-Junco presents many fascinating questions in this book that is like no other.’ Publishers Weekly
‘An extraordinary book by one of the leading Mexican writers.’ Juan Villoro |
