Faces in the Crowd

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As sinuous a novel as Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd is, it is all the more remarkable on account of it being a debut — and a most assured one at that. The Mexican novelist and essayist's first fiction entwines multiple narratives and perspectives, shifting between them with the ease and gracefulness of a writer far beyond her years (Faces in the Crowd was published when Luiselli was 28). The metafictional scaffolding of Luiselli's novel is seamlessly constructed, and its bibliocentric façade entrenches it within a rich tradition of referential Latin American literature. Faces in the Crowd, beyond its gorgeous writing and superb composition, is modest yet striking, measured yet salient. Last fall, the National Book Foundation named Luiselli one of 2014's "5 under 35," and given the evident range of her myriad literary talents, it's no great wonder why. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com

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In Mexico City, a young mother is writing a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

"An extraordinary new literary talent." The Daily Telegraph

"Valeria Luiselli's lovely and eccentric first novel is...peppered with arresting imagery." The New York Times

"[A] lovely and mysterious first novel...the multilayered book she has devised brings freshness and excitement to such complex inquiries." The Wall Street Journal

"Throughout Faces in the Crowd, Luiselli crafts beautiful sentences, while gleefully thumbing her nose at novelistic conventions. All that makes her an exciting and essential voice on the Latin American literary landscape." Los Angeles Times

"If every word, for her, has the shadow of two others behind it, and if every city in which she lives carries the ghostly afterimage of all the other cities she has known — as well as the voices of the writers she has researched upon her arrival — then her books become all the more enthralling for the multiplicity they champion...the great beauty of her art is seeing all her contrasting stories collapse or blend or combine into an unexpected whole." Los Angeles Review of Books

Collapsing narratives and the perils of translation from "one of the most important new voices in Mexican writing" (Alma Guillermoprieto).

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"An extraordinary new literary talent."The Daily Telegraph

"In part a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this deceptively modest-seeming, astonishingly inventive novel creates an extraordinary intimacy, a sensibility so alive it quietly takes over all your senses, quivering through your nerve endings, opening your eyes and heart. Youth, from unruly student years to early motherhood and a loving marriageand then, in the book's second half, wilder and something else altogether, the fearless, half-mad imagination of youth, I might as well call ithas rarely been so freshly, charmingly, and unforgettably portrayed. Valeria Luiselli is a masterful, entirely original writer."Francisco Goldman

In Mexico City, a young mother is writing a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.
"Luiselli s haunting debut novel, about a young mother living in Mexico City who writes a novel looking back on her time spent working as a translator of obscure works at a small independent press in Harlem, erodes the concrete borders of everyday life with a beautiful, melancholy contemplation of disappearance. . . . Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition." Publishers Weekly
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Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her novel and essays have been translated into many languages and her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's. Some of her recent projects include a ballet libretto for the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, performed by the New York City Ballet in Lincoln Center in 2010; a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London; and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. She lives in New York City.