Norte

Three unconnected people travel north, each passing in isolation over one of the most troubled and controversial dividing lines in the world: the Mexico‒US border. But in a melee of language and blood, their stories and the stories of those they meet-of a young serial killer, a waitress and graphic novelist and her lover (and former professor), and an outsider artist in a mental institution-gradually begin to coalesce. Daring in both its protagonists and its structure, Edmundo Paz Soldán’s Norte is a fast-paced, vivid, and operatic blending of distinct voices. Together, they lay bare the darkness of the line over which these souls-like so many others-have passed.

A prominent member of a new generation of Latin American writers, Paz Soldán stands in defiant opposition to the magical realism of the past century, instead grounding his work in political, economic, and historical realities. Norte is no exception; it is a tale of displacement and the very human costs of immigration. Shocking with its violence even as it thrills with its language, confounding rather than cowering under the cliché of the murderous, drug-dealing immigrant, Norte is a disquieting, imperative work-an undeniable reflection of our fragmented modern world.

Born in Bolivia, Edmundo Paz Soldán is professor of Latin American literature at Cornell University. He is the multiple-award-winning author of five short story collections and ten novels, two of which, Turing’s Delirium and The Matter of Desire, have been translated into English. Valerie Miles is a translator, publisher, writer, and professor for literary translation at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She is founding codirector of Granta en español and founding editor of the New York Review of Books Classics collection in Spanish translation. Her recent works include A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction; Because She Never Asked, a translation of Enrique Vila-Matas’s work Porque ella no lo pidió; and This Too Shall Pass, a translation of Milena Busquet’s Eso también pasará.