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Carmen Boullosa: “Texas: The Great Theft”
February 13, 2015 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm | Stevenson Fireside Lounge
FreeCarmen Boullosa is one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets, and playwrights, whose works interweave speculative, historical, and psychological themes with a powerful feminist point of view and a sharp satirical wit. She has published fifteen novels, among them El complot de los románticos (winner of the Premio de Novela Café Gijón in 2008), Las paredes hablan, La virgen y el violin, and perhaps most famously, Llanto. Her works in English translation include They’re Cows, We’re Pigs; Leaving Tabasco; and Cleopatra Dismounts, all published by Grove Press, and Jump of the Manta Ray, with illustrations by Philip Hughes, published by The Old Press. Her novels have also been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian. A prominent essayist and journalist, she writes a regular column for El Universal in Mexico City. She has taught at Georgetown, Columbia, and New York University, as well as at universities in nearly a dozen other countries. She is currently Distinguished Lecturer at the City College of New York.
In her latest novel, Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014), originally published as Tejas: La gran ladronería en la frontera norte (Editorial Alfaguera, 2013), Carmen Boullosa challenges US versions of the romantic origins of Texas. Set on the eve of the US Civil War in the fictional twin border cities of Bruneville and Matasanchez, the novel depicts relations among gringos, German immigrants, Mexican landowners and laborers, escaped slaves, Apaches, and Comanches. In the words of the Dallas Morning News’ Roberto Ontiveros, it “sardonically explodes and seductively reins itself back in with a panoptic prose that stares down hard into the absurd and uncomfortable prejudices that have historically split this region.”
For an advance PDF copy of the novel in Spanish and/or in English, please contact Kirsten Silva Gruesz (ksgruesz@ucsc.edu).