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Valeria Luiselli

Biography

Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection SIDEWALKS; the novels FACES IN THE CROWD and THE STORY OF MY TEETH; and, most recently, TELL ME HOW IT ENDS: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. She lives in New York City.

Valeria Luiselli

Books by Valeria Luiselli

Lost Children Archive
by Valeria Luiselli - Fiction

An artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained --- or lost in the desert along the way.

Faces in the Crowd
by Valeria Luiselli - Fiction

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. As the voices of these narrators overlap and merge, they drift into one single stream, an elegiac evocation of love and loss.