2.0
Death Takes Me
ByPublisher Description
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.
“Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . [a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Lit Hub, The AV Club
A city is always a cemetery.
A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.
Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
“Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . [a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Lit Hub, The AV Club
A city is always a cemetery.
A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.
Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities6 Reviews
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Brian Moring
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sarahdrdj
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Moon Book Eater
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Kim F.
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“I have incredibly complicated feelings about this book...
First and foremost, the writing style is absolutely beautiful. Lyrical and poetic... The writing is full of captivating and often haunting imagery.
For the story itself... I think it was interesting enough, but I do wish more had happened. The pacing was overall slow for a book featuring the work of a serial killer, and ultimately, with the quality of writing, I wanted it to say more. A good deal of time among the characters was spent analyzing the killer's motives, and the women in particular begin to grapple with the thought of "do I even want to find the killer?" I think the payoff would have been greater for me for the story to end with a different killer, or to end with the killer still at large... But the killer we ended up with felt abrupt and unsatisfying. Perhaps this was the author's goal... As the characters in the story analyze and over analyze, maybe it is more simple than we all want it to be.
I would recommend this book to those who like reading lyrical and poetic prose, who also like a good mystery. If you are a fan of horror and not so much the above? I would say this is maybe not the book for you.”
About Cristina Rivera Garza
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome, 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 Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.
Sarah Booker is a teacher and literary translator. Her translations include novels by Mónica Ojeda, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Gabriela Ponce. She is also an associate editor with Southwest Review.
Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Her translations include Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche, Claudia Peña Claros’s The Trees, Isabel Zapata’s In Vitro, Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s The Brush, and Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation.
Sarah Booker is a teacher and literary translator. Her translations include novels by Mónica Ojeda, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Gabriela Ponce. She is also an associate editor with Southwest Review.
Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Her translations include Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche, Claudia Peña Claros’s The Trees, Isabel Zapata’s In Vitro, Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s The Brush, and Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation.
Other books by Cristina Rivera Garza
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