
The Transmigration of Bodies
Yuri Herrera(Author)
And Other Stories (Publisher)
Published on 7. July 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
160 pages
978-1-908276-72-8 (ISBN)
Description
Shortlisted for the 2017 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
Shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award
A plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the city's underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage.
Yuri Herrera's novel is a response to the violence of contemporary Mexico. With echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Roberto Bolano and Raymond Chandler, The Transmigration of Bodies is a noirish tragedy and a tribute to those bodies - loved, sanctified, lusted after, and defiled - that violent crime has touched.
Shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award
A plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the city's underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage.
Yuri Herrera's novel is a response to the violence of contemporary Mexico. With echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Roberto Bolano and Raymond Chandler, The Transmigration of Bodies is a noirish tragedy and a tribute to those bodies - loved, sanctified, lusted after, and defiled - that violent crime has touched.
Reviews / Votes
'Herrera's characteristic concision goes a step further here, his skill for expression more impressive in its restraint than its excess. This is a harsh novel, as are those from a borderland besieged by extreme violence, but it's also oddly comforting, in large part due to its exceptional literary quality.' * El Pais * 'The Transmigration of Bodies is a magnificent book and its author one of the few indispensable Latin American writers of our times.' -- author of My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Patricio Pron Rain 'The Transmigration of Bodies represents a highpoint in the genre of the novel. Herrera has been slowly building an oeuvre constructed on a singular conception of the world, in which literature's past and present form a continuum. Reading him gives one the sense of diving into his library, a place that is unashamed of belonging to a tradition and being well-read and much-underlined.' -- author of Sudden Alvaro Enrigue Death 'In Herrera's slim, amusing book, [he] strips Romeo & Juliet to its essence and sets it against a plague that symbolises Mexico's recent violent history.' Publishers Weekly * Publishers Weekly * 'Yuri Herrera's novels are like little lights in a vast darkness. I want to see whatever he shows me.' -- San Francisco Green Apple Books Stephen Sparks CA. 'This is as noir should be, written with all the grit and grime of hard-boiled crime and all the literary merit we're beginning to expect from Herrera. Before the end he'll have you asking how, in the shadow of anonymity, do you differentiate between the guilty and the innocent?' -- Mr B's Emporium Tom Harris Bath. 'Both hysterical and bleak, The Transmigration of Bodies builds an entire world in 100 pages. Herrera's ability to express everything in so few words, his skill of merging the argot of the streets with the poetry of life is unrivalled. The world his characters inhabit is dangerous and urban, like a postcard sent from the ends of the earth. Reading his compact novels is both exhilarating and unforgettable.' -- Houston Brazos Bookstore Mark Haber TX. 'A fabulous book full of low-life characters struggling to get by. It's an everyday story of love, lust, disease and death. Indispensable.' -- Waterstones Cork Matthew Geden Ireland 'A microcosmic look at the lives of two families straight out of a Shakespearean drama. Pick it up and you won't put it down till you've finished.' -- Posman Books in Chelsea Market Grace Waltemyer NY. 'A work replete with the gritty, informal prose first displayed in Signs - rooted firmly in the modern world yet evoking the feel of an epic divorced from time . . . a cross between Cormac McCarthy and a detective novel, an incisive portrait evoking a Mexican Inherent Vice.' -- Chicago Seminary Co-op Bookstore Marina Clementi IL 'The Transmigration of Bodies reads like a fever dream: an intense, enthralling examination of how people live in a city of the dying and the dead. It takes an extraordinary amount of skill to combine elements of noir, political commentary, hardboiled crime, and allegory (not to mention Shakespeare, with a seasoning of existential ennui) and keep the novel moving, or in this case, racing along. Herrera, clearly, has at least that much talent, and then some.' -- Chicago Volumes Bookcafe Thomas Flynn ILMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
High Wycombe
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 195 mm
Width: 128 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-908276-72-8 (9781908276728)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Yuri Herrera
The Transmigration of Bodies
E-Book
05/2016
And Other Stories
€9.59
Available for download
Persons
Yuri Herrera's first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, won the Best Translated Book Award and was chosen by The Guardian as one of 'The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century'. His second novel The Transmigration of Bodies was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and his sci-fi inflected collection of stories Ten Planets was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. He teaches at Tulane University, New Orleans. Lisa Dillman teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Her recent translations include The Bitch and Abyss by Pilar Quintana.