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This Is Not Miami

This Is Not Miami

Fernanda Melchor

  • awardShortlisted, James Tait Black Prize, Biography, United Kingdom, 2024
  • awardLonglisted, National Book Award for Translated Literature, United States, 2023
  • awardLonglisted, National Translation Award in Prose, United States, 2024
  • Translated by Sophie Hughes

    Set in and around the city of Veracruz in Mexico, This Is Not Miami delivers twelve devastating stories that spiral from real events. These cronicás—a genre unique to Latin American writing, blending reportage and fiction—probe the motivations of murderers and misfits, compelling us to understand or even empathise with them. Melchor is like a ventriloquist, using a range of distinctive voices to evoke the smells, sounds and words of this fascinating world that includes mistreated women, damaged families, refugees, prisoners and even a beauty queen.

    As in her hugely acclaimed novels Hurricane Season and Paradais, Fernanda Melchor’s masterful stories show how the violent and shocking events that make the headlines are only the surface ruptures of a society on the brink of chaos.

    INTERVIEWS and REVIEWS

    Kill Your Darlings    
    Kirkus Reviews (starred review)    
    Radio NZ: Nine to Noon    
    Readings     

    Fernanda Melchor
    About the Author

    Fernanda Melchor was born in 1982 in Veracruz, Mexico. She is widely recognised as one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices. She won the Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award for Hurricane Season, which was also longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was a New York Times...

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    About the Translator

    Sophie Hughes has translated works by Laia Jufresa and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others. Her translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Melchor’s recent novel Paradais and her collection of non-fiction pieces, This Is Not Miami. In 2021 she was awarded the Queen...

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    Extent:
    192pp
    Format:
    Paperback
    Text publication date:
    4 April 2023
    ISBN:
    9781922790200
    AU Price:
    $32.99
    NZ Price:
    $38.00
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    Praise for Fernanda Melchor
    andThis Is Not Miami

    ‘Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.’

    ‘Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’

    ‘[Hurricane Season and Paradais] establish Melchor…as the latest of Faulkner’s Latin American inheritors, and among the most formidable…Melchor’s prose is muscular but always attentive to the world of the senses and carried forward by an impeccable ear…She isn’t holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she’s dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find.’

    ‘Based on a real-life murder in rural Mexico, Fernanda’s story paints a powerful, visceral story of a violent world where superstition and suspicion collide. The language – translated into English by Sophie Hughes – is astonishing and hypnotic. Tread carefully; even though this book is narrated by deeply human characters, its portrayal of cycles of abuse, poverty and despair is as unrelenting as it is beautifully crafted.’

    ‘Though there are glitters of humour and empathy, Hurricane Season is an uncompromisingly savage piece of work: difficult to escape from, built to shock. Yet it’s also elating. I was left buoyed up by Melchor’s anger, elated because she had shown me things I needed to be faced with.’

    ‘Melchor’s vulgar yet elegant prose crackles with explosive energy…Paradais is a blistering (and blisteringly intelligent) interrogation of privilege and class disparity.’

    ‘The stories are acts of rebelliousness and bravery…[Fernanda Melchor] continues to establish herself internationally as one of the strongest new voices in Mexican literature.’

    ‘Melchor toggles playfully between true and might be true in a way that is quite provocative…A captivating read.’

    ‘Melchor’s journalistic voice threads around and through those of her informants, expanding and contracting to accommodate the lives at the centre of these narratives.’

    ‘Melchor, a new literary voice from Mexico, writes of the lawlessness and brutality she sees in her home of Veracruz.’

    ‘This is a book that’s as gorgeous as it is dark, and it proves that Melchor is one of the finest writers working today. Absolutely stunning.’

    ‘Jamie is always good at finding new ways of saying things. This captures streets at night and I love the use of colour.’

    Other editions ofThis Is Not Miami
    • This Is Not Miami
      ebook
      ISBN: 9781922791283
      4 April 2023
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