They Will Dream in the Garden

by Gabriela Damián Miravete, Adrian Demopulos (Translator)

Overview

In They Will Dream in the Garden, Otherwise Award-winning author, Gabriela Damián Miravete elaborates the disconcerting experience of living as a woman in Mexico—a territory characterized by its great contrasts, from violence and activism to affectionate and communal resistance: flowers that arise from the earth to expand the cosmic consciousness of those who take it, nuns who create artifacts so that their native languages do not perish, a memorial for the victims of femicide that the State controls, but whose old guardian wants to turn into a laboratory to return their lost future…

They Will Dream in the Garden shows the journey that its author has undertaken towards a more conscious writing that, through wonder and beauty, trusts in the possibilities that literature offers to unite, question, and transform our being in the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798986614618
Publisher:	Rosarium Publishing
Publication date:	12/05/2023
Pages:	136
Sales rank:	534,345
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mexico City native Gabriela Damián Miravete writes fiction and essays that have been translated to English, Italian, Portuguese, French, and published in A Larger Reality/Una realidad más amplia (part of the Hugo Award Finalist project The Mexicanx Initiative Scrapbook), Boundaries & Bridges: The Wiscon Chronicles Vol. 12 (Aqueduct Press) and the World Fantasy Award Finalist anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic (Small Beer Press). She won the Otherwise Award (formerly James Tiptree, Jr. Award) for the short story “They Will Dream in the Garden”. She loves working in collaborative projects such as the art & science collective Cúmulo de Tesla and Mexicona: Imaginación y Futuro, a speculative fiction literary festival in Spanish. Gabriela spends (maybe too much) time listening to rocks, whales, and what Fellini and Chewbacca, her two cats, have to say about life on planet Earth.   

Editorial Reviews

10/30/2023

Otherwise Award winner Miravete (Meteotopia) explores the roles women play in Mexican culture and history in these 11 unusual speculative shorts. In the standout “La Purificación,” a frustrated young woman takes comfort in baking bread and preparing offerings for lost souls alongside the spirits of her grandmother and aunt. “Retreat from the World Outside,” which takes the form of a dossier of evidence and testimony submitted to a holy tribunal in 1779, tells of Sister Ágata, a nun accused of heresy for inventing a recording device to preserve the Indigenous languages spoken by the nuns in her convent. In the powerful title story, an old woman called only the Caretaker reminisces on her life as an activist while tending to a garden with numerous holograms of girls and young women, all victims of femicide. Tone and genre vary wildly: the ghostly “Music and Petals” and zombie tale “The Bridge” delve into horror, “The Art of Memory” pulls from classic sci-fi tropes, and “The End of the Party” portrays a postapocalypse. The whole feels oddly disjointed as a result, despite the through line of what it means to live in Mexico as a woman. Still, the individual stories are undeniably thought-provoking. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Gabriela Damián Miravete is arguably one of the most important writers of speculative fiction in Mexico, and her collection, They Will Dream in the Garden, showcases the breadth and depth of her work. Ranging from a bemused humanism reminiscent of Le Guin to disarming surrealism that reminds one of Murakami, these eleven stories are also deeply rooted in Mexico as place and culture and history. Damián Miravete masterfully wields semantics and syntax, trope and scheme, to draw us through unexpected layers in every piece, like delicate palimpsests that yield upon close observation startling phrases containing unforgettable truths. And balancing this technical skill is an emotional resonance, perhaps best felt in the harrowing and moving title story. They Will Dream in the Garden is a must-have for readers of literary and genre fiction alike, and let us hope that Gabriela captivates with such tales for many more years to come."—David Bowles, award-winning author of The Prince & the Coyote  

“Spun of nightmares and spiderwebs, This collection of stories by the Mexican author Gabriela Damián Miravete stretches from its roots in the Surrealist Movement to encompass the best and the worst of human imagination. Miravete brings us visions of worlds where animals and humans connect in mutual respect, women are valued for their abilities to empathize and collectively provide solutions, and the dead reach out to support the living in our daily worries. In addition, the collection includes the best psychotropic adventure story I have read. Every page of They Will Dream in the Garden is drenched in images of water. Every story gives us a chance to re-imagine ourselves in a world where feminism has won out against the evils of the drug trade, of patriarchy, and of machismo. If only. But we can dream.”—Kathleen Alcalá, author of Spirits of the Ordinary

“Luminous stories, haunted with memories as deep as the roots of the oldest ahuehuete, They Will Dream in the Garden is charged with a sense of justice that shows the world as it is, and as it could be.” —Christopher Brown, Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas

 

“In They Will Dream in the Garden, Gabriela Damián Miravete takes the speculative genres and makes them her own, so specific to Mexico but with that fairy tale quality of being anywhere or nowhere. This is a magnificent collection of short stories, with characters full of determination to invent and fashion with the tools they have, that never forgets that humans are the species that “praises beauty while destroying it.”—Matthew David Goodwin, editor of Latinx Rising and co-editor of Speculative Fiction for Dreamers

From the Publisher