Translation Rights TQE / Death Hits

It all begins the day a woman discovers the castrated body of a young man. The corpse lies on the asphalt, at the end of a narrow street, with some mysterious verses by the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik. When the woman – who goes by the name of Cristina Rivera Garza – notifies the police, she immediately and automatically becomes the informer. What has she seen? How does she interpret the meaning of the verses? Why do these victims, young, tortured, amputated men, appear throughout the city? Two women – a journalist from Nota Roja, slightly hunchbacked, and the Detective from the Homicide Department – are determined to solve a case that, like so many others throughout history, offers more surprises than answers. Only one thing is definite: the reader will be met with an intense thriller in which nothing, not even the writing, is innocent. A disturbing and fiercely contemporary novel.

“La muerte me da delves into the subject of writing, of the body, of guilt, of contemporary violence, of the victim who is always, at least in the Spanish language, a woman. It draws up a full and intelligent exercise to approach the power of the imagination and to unfold before the world from the feminine condition.”

Sergio González Rodríguez, El Ángel (Reforma)

Cristina Rivera Garza was born on the north-eastern Mexican frontier and currently lives between San Diego and Tijuana.  She is the author of a body of work that touches many genres, novel, short story, poetry and essay; that is interdisciplinary, literature and history; that is written in her native language, Spanish, and in her second language, English.  She has written articles for the Hispanic American Historical Review and for The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, as well as for other publications in the United States.  Cristina Rivera Garza has obtained six of the most prestigious literary awards in Mexico.  Her books include La más mía (The Most Mine), poems, 1998; La guerra no importa (War Doesn’t Matter), 1991.  Her novel Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry), Tusquets 2000, won the National Prize José Rubén Romero, the Impac-Conarte-ITESM Prize and, in 2001, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.  The novel has had an unprecedented success.