Informationen zum Autor Nicolás Medina Mora was born and raised in Mexico City. He has degrees from Yale University and the writing program of the University of Iowa, and has worked in New York City as a journalist at Reuters and BuzzFeed. His writing has appeared in The Nation , The New York Times , and n+1 , where he won the 2023 n+1 Writers' Fellowship. He lives in Mexico City, where he is a writer and editor for Revista Nexos . Klappentext Moving between New York City, Mexico City, and Iowa City, a young member of the Mexican elite sees his life splinter in a centuries-spanning debut that blends the Latin American traditions of Roberto Bolaño and Fernanda Melchor with the autofiction of US writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole. Sebastián lived a childhood of privilege in Mexico City. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowa's MFA program. But Sebastián's life is shaken by the Trump administration's restrictions on immigrants, his mother's terminal cancer, the cracks in his relationship, and his father's forced resignation at the hands of Mexico's new president. As he struggles through the Trump and López Obrador years, Sebastián must confront his father's role in the Mexican drug war and navigate his whiteness in Mexican contexts even as he is often perceived as a person of color in the US. As he does so, the novel moves through centuries of Mexican literary history, from the 17th century letters of a peevishly polymathic Spanish colonizer to the contemporary packaging of Mexican writers for a US audience. Split between the US and Mexico, this stunning debut explores whiteness, power, immigration, and the history of Mexican literature, to wrestle with the contradictory relationship between two countries bound by geography and torn apart by politics. Leseprobe Entre las naciones como entre los amantes Like the Spaniards before them, the Americans landed in Veracruz and marched west, away from the malarial fevers of the Tierra Caliente and up the jagged slopes of the Sierra Madre, past taciturn agaves and stern oyameles and the blinding snowcaps of half-asleep volcanoes, until they reached the high valley where the air was thin and clear and the white light of the autumn sun fell vertical and merciless on the ill-defended capital, casting angular shadows on the barricades where the remnants of an army of barefoot conscripts whiled away their final moments, dulling terror with liquor and gambling, gathering stones to throw when their obsolete muskets ran out of ammunition, not so much resolved as resigned to die in a futile stand against an enemy destined to rule the continent. The truth, however, is that none of it was fated. At the start of the nineteenth century, conflict between Mexico and America was likely but not inevitable. The war that transformed the United States from an uneasy federation of small Atlantic republics into a global empire was but one of infinite possible outcomes: trusting coexistence grounded on commerce, friendship born from shared commitments to self-determination, even a gradual blurring of the lines that in due time could have brought about the death of two nation-states founded on genocide and slaveryand given birth to a North American Commune. But history is the transmutation of contingency into necessity, and what need not happen did. In the cool hours before dawn on September 12, 1847, the artillerymen of the United States Army trained their howitzers on the last significant fortification between them and Mexico City: Chapultepec Castle, a stone complex atop a steep hill, built as a manor, that now housed a military academy. Sixteen-inch rounds began falling on walls adorned with ornate masonry but offering scant cover. The thousand men of the garrisonamong them cadets as young a...

Autorentext

Nicolás Medina Mora was born and raised in Mexico City. He has degrees from Yale University and the writing program of the University of Iowa, and has worked in New York City as a journalist at Reuters and BuzzFeed. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, and n+1, where he won the 2023 n+1 Writers' Fellowship. He lives in Mexico City, where he is a writer and editor for Revista Nexos.

Klappentext

Moving between New York City, Mexico City, and Iowa City, a young member of the Mexican elite sees his life splinter in a centuries-spanning debut that blends the Latin American traditions of Roberto Bolaño and Fernanda Melchor with the autofiction of US writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole.

Sebastián lived a childhood of privilege in Mexico City. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowa’s MFA program.

But Sebastián’s life is shaken by the Trump administration’s restrictions on immigrants, his mother’s terminal cancer, the cracks in his relationship, and his father’s forced resignation at the hands of Mexico’s new president. As he struggles through the Trump and López Obrador years, Sebastián must confront his father’s role in the Mexican drug war and navigate his whiteness in Mexican contexts even as he is often perceived as a person of color in the US. As he does so, the novel moves through centuries of Mexican literary history, from the 17th century letters of a peevishly polymathic Spanish colonizer to the contemporary packaging of Mexican writers for a US audience.

Split between the US and Mexico, this stunning debut explores whiteness, power, immigration, and the history of Mexican literature, to wrestle with the contradictory relationship between two countries bound by geography and torn apart by politics.