The Iliac Crest - Paperback

by Cristina Rivera Garza (Author), Sarah Booker (Translator), Elena Poniatowska (Foreword by)

Surreal and gothic, The Iliac Crest is a masterful excavation of forgotten Mexican women writers, illustrating the myriad ways that gendered language can wield destructive power.

On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator's house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host's identity. The women are strangely intimate―even inventing together an incomprehensible, fluid language―and harass the narrator by repeatedly claiming that they know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. As the increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity, he eventually finds himself in a sanatorium.

Published for the first time in English, this Gothic tale is "utterly weird yet deeply resonant in its portrayal of gendered violence" (The Millions). Through layered and haunting prose, Cristina Rivera Garza unravels the cultural and political histories of Mexico, probing at the misogyny that fuels the disappearance of women in literature and in real life.

"Astounding and thought-provoking." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An intelligent, beautiful story about bodies disguised as a story about language disguised as a story about night terrors. Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator." --Yuri Herrera, author of Kingdom Cons

Published for the first time in English, this Gothic tale destabilizes male-female binaries and subverts literary tropes.

Author Biography

Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning author, translator, and critic. Her books, originally written in Spanish, have been translated into multiple languages. She is the recipient of the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature (2013), the Anna Seghers-Preis (2005), and the only two-time winner of the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (2001; 2009). She received her PhD in 2012 in Latin American history from the University of Houston, where she is currently Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies.

Sarah Booker is an English-to-Spanish translator and PhD candidate at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research revolves around contemporary Latin American narratives and translation studies. She is particularly interested in the relationship between translation and identity in the region, as well as fictional representations of translation.