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Rodrigo Jardón |
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Jazmina Barrera, editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope, was a fellow at the Foundation for Mexican Letters and at Mexico's Fonca's Program for young writers. She is a member of the SNCA (National System of Art Creators in Mexico) and has published work in the Paris Review, El Malpensante, Words Without Borders, El País, the New York Times and Electric Literature. She is the author of four books in Spanish, including Cuerpo extraño, Cuaderno de faros (On Lighthouses), which was chosen for the Indie Next list, and Linea Nigra, a finalist for several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle's Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. Her novel Cross-Stitch (Two Lines Press, November 7, 2023) is, in the words of Shelf Awareness's review, a "feminist, intertextual gem... [that] considers friendship and grief alongside women's work."
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Cross-Stitch is the story of three friends, embroidered with fragments about the different roles that embroidery has had for communities of women across the ages.
On your nightstand now:
Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities by Marcia Bjornerud. I'm writing a book with my friend Paulina Deschamps about the names of mountains, and that's why I'm reading (and loving) it. Suddenly every stone around me is a precious stone.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. It opened my eyes to the ways in which language creates realities. It moved me and filled my mind with a rich and amazing universe. It is one of the few books I know where the colors of letters are meaningful.
Your top five authors:
Don't do this to me! Okay:
Virginia Woolf
Natalia Ginzburg
Julian Barnes
Verónica Murguía
Elena Garro
Book you've faked reading:
Recently, a book I had to blurb. Someone with great taste close to me, who had read it, wrote it on my behalf. I won't tell you which. I hate the empire of blurbs. Never trust blurbs.
Book you're an evangelist for:
El Ángel de Nicolás by Verónica Murguía. A collection of mind-blowing, wonderfully crafted short stories. She still hasn't been translated into English, and she's one of the best writers we've got.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Dark by Lemony Snicket [illustrated by Jon Klassen]. I didn't know it was already a modern classic. I'm a children's books junkie since my son was born.
Book you hid from your parents:
Very hippie parents. There was nothing to hide. Though maybe the books I wrote about them, for a while.
Book that changed your life:
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I was planting a vegetable garden for the first time when I read it, and I was obsessed for a while. Everyone should read that.
Favorite line from a book:
Lately it's this one, from Mary Shelley's Introduction to Frankenstein: "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos."
Five books you'll never part with:
Balún Canán by Rosario Castellanos
Plainwater by Anne Carson
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra
Butes by Pascal Quignard
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. I'd like to fall in love with the Glass family all over again.