Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa, Shelby Vincent (Translator)

Overview

Three narrators from different historical eras engage in preserving history in Heavens on Earth. As her narrators sense each other and interact through time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose.

Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. Her most recent novel Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, and won Typographical Era's Translation Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941920442
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. She has published over a dozen novels, two of which were designated the Best Novel Published in Mexico by the prestigious magazine Reforma—her second novel, Before, also won the renowned Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel; and her novel La otra mano de Lepanto was also selected as one of the Top 100 Novels Published in Spanish in the past 25 years. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award, was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award, and has been nominated for the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award. Boullosa has received numerous prizes and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship. Also a poet, playwright, essayist, and cultural critic, Boullosa is a Distinguished Lecturer at City College of New York, and her books have been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian.

Shelby Vincent received her PhD in Literary Translation from the University of Texas at Dallas's School of Arts and Humanities in 2015. She is currently translating another of Boullosa's novels entitled The Virgin and the Violin, which is loosely based on the female Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola, and which Deep Vellum will publish in 2018.

Editorial Reviews

10/23/2017
Boullosa’s ambitious novel unfolds a triptych on the past, present, and future of her native Mexico. The initial narrator is the scholar Lear, who dwells in our future in a supposed utopia called L’Atlàntide that’s in the process of abolishing memory, dreams, and language itself. Doomed to watch his world willfully forgetting its past, Lear discovers a text in Latin by a 16th-century Aztec priest named Don Hernando de Rivas, a native of the city-state of Texcoco. Don Hernando sees the coming of the conquistadors to Mexico and witnesses his people brought to heel by the Franciscan friars, who threaten to eradicate the Aztecs’ cultural memory. Between Lear and Don Hernando is the latter’s original translator, Estela Ruiz, a 20th-century resident of Mexico City who, having come of age in the hopeful and progressive ’70s, now sees her world ruptured between its post-revolutionary present and its colonial past. The affinity among these three narrators bridges language, culture, and time, as they muse on their respective lineages, experience visions, and rail helplessly against the tide of modernization that depends on the annihilation of their shared history. Boullosa’s message about how individuals must inculcate the past amid the indifference of the present comes through, making for a thought-provoking, if sometimes trying, novel. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

The book occupies a Borgesian tradition in which possible and impossible exist simultaneously in one text.” — John Trefry, Full Stop

“[Boullosa] is witty, wacky, iconoclastic, post-modern and thoroughly original.” — The Modern Novel blog

“Read Boullosa because she is a masterful commander of fantastic language.” — M. Bartley Seigel, Words Without Borders

From the Publisher