Terrestrial

One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Most Anticipated Books of the Year - A Kirkus Reviews Most Anticipated Book

"[Rivera Garza] revels in the unexpected, eschewing the straightforward at all times, but never in a showy way. These stories, focused on traveling, are absolutely beautiful, written with Rivera Garza's sparkling and enchanting prose. In other words: She's done it again. Incandescent." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A fiercely poetic, tenderly observed portrait of young women's travels on the fringes of Mexico and the United States, by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer

In this new collection of genre-defying stories by Cristina Rivera Garza, a woman visits what she thinks could be her old lover's hometown after being abandoned by her, years earlier. Two herons hitchhike across Mexico. A group of workers build a new home, only to see it destroyed by the state.

With little baggage and much bravado, the characters in Terrestrial hitchhike, migrate, take trains, wander or, at times, fly, to survive the mandates of patriarchy and capitalism. On dusty roads or by a lake turned suddenly ominous, they remain in close contact with the earth's surface, sensing its wild promise and capacity for violence, its degradation and enduring beauty.

As she did in her Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Liliana's Invincible Summer, Rivera Garza forges new forms, experimenting with structure and time as she tails the intrepid travelers with shimmering and honest prose. Combining journalism, novelistic writing, and themes of female freedom, gore capitalism, and class struggle, Terrestrial is a meditation on travel and distance, and our ties to the earth we tread on.

Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of Death Takes Me, The Taiga Syndrome, and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir, Liliana's Invincible Summer, won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.