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"Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . [a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors' Choice) A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire
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.
La Muerte Me Da / Death Takes Me - Paperback
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by Cristina Rivera Garza (Author)
En la lista de los mejores libros del 2025 de: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire
«La novela es densa y elíptica, un paisaje onírico con una poderosa resaca [...]. [Una] desgarradora y laberíntica obra maestra. -Katie Kitamura, The New York Times
"Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . [a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors' Choice) A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, Marie Claire
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.
Author Biography
Cristina Rivera Garza. Autora. Traductora. Crítica. Sus libros más recientes son Autobiografía del algodón (Literatura Random House, 2020) y Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country (The Feminist Press, 2020, traducido por Sarah Booker, finalista del NBCC Award). En 2020 obtuvo la MacArthur Fellowship. Profesora distinguida y fundadora del doctorado en Escritura Creativa en español en la Universidad de Houston.
Number of Pages: 352
Dimensions: 1.11 x 8.99 x 5.29 IN
Publication Date: March 03, 2026