Feb 9, 2021
This event is now available to watch on our YouTube page, along with the
rest of our 2020 festival programming.
“Melchor’s English-language debut is a furious vortex of voices
that swirl around a murder in a provincial Mexican town. Forceful,
frenzied, violent, and uncompromising, Melchor’s depiction of a
town ogling its own destruction is a powder keg that ignites on the
first page and sustains its intense, explosive heat until its final
sentence.” —Publishers Weekly
One of Mexico’s most promising and prominent writers, Fernanda
Melchor has created, in her debut novel Hurricane
Season, a Gulf Coast noir drawing comparisons to everyone from
Faulkner to Bolaño and Marlon James. NPR has
called Hurricane Season "a mix of drugs, sex,
mythology, small-town desperation, poverty, and superstition."
The Los Angeles Review of Books describes
it as "a novel that sinks like lead to the bottom of the soul
and remains there, its images full of color, its characters alive
and raging against their fate.” Beginning with the discovery of a
corpse, by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals,
a Mexican village is propelled into an investigation of how and why
the murder occurred. Join Fernanda Melchor as she reads from and
discusses her work, with novelist and professor Yuri Herrera,
author of several works including the recent nonfiction
book A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine
Fire. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation