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Letters from Latin America
Fiction by Mexican authors Juan Pablo Villalobos and Fernanda Melchor and by Dominican writer and singer-songwriter Rita Indiana
PIC CAP FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH: Rita Indiana
READING the Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos's latest book I Don't Expect Anyone To Believe Me (And Other Stories, £11.99) is like entering into a fantastical world so powerful and mesmerising that its almost impossible to leave it.
Masterly translated by Daniel Hahn and a well-deserved winner of the prestigious Herralde Prize, the novel is as witty and entertaining as it is thought-provoking. It involves the story of desperate immigrants, literature students and violent gangsters in contemporary Barcelona. But it’s much more than that.
Villalobos is highly successful in conveying a world where endemic corruption, organised crime, state violence, the dividing line between fiction and reality and the limits of humour in literature get crazier as the story progresses.
More from this author
Travelogue/reportage by Argentinean Maria Sonia Cristoff, and poetry by Peruvian Gaston Fernandez and Puerto Rican Cristina Perez Diaz
A pamphlet by British Latinx poet Patrick Romero McCafferty, poetry by Anglo-Argentinian Miguel Cullen, and a book of conjuring poems by Mexican Pedro Serrano
LEO BOIX selects the best books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction written by Latinx and Latin American authors published this year
Mexican Yuri Herrera’s novel about Benito Juarez in New Orleans, and poetry by Mexican Fabio Morabito and Argentine Sergio Chejfec