From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.
A city is always a cemetery.
When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail polish: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.
Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Written in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims—a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine—Death Takes Me unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the professor’s classroom into the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art, as it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the M. D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies, and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.
View titles by Cristina Rivera Garza
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.
A city is always a cemetery.
When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail polish: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.
Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Written in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims—a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine—Death Takes Me unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the professor’s classroom into the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art, as it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the M. D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies, and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.
View titles by Cristina Rivera Garza
