Faces In The Crowd

"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 & heart. Youth, from unruly student years to early motherhood and a loving marriage - & then, in the book's second half, wilder & something else altogether, the fearless, half-mad imagination of youth, I might as well call it - has rarely been so freshly, charmingly, & 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 & the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. 

"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 & identity with grace & intuition."  -  Publishers Weekly

Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer & an unexpected & necessary voice in contemporary fiction. 

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 & grew up in South Africa. Her work has been translated into many languages & has appeared in publications includingthe New York Times, Granta, & McSweeney's.