yuri herrera interview

RB: All right, I scratch that line of thought. Q. EP: I don’t know – eight. EP: It is being attacked so to speak. Become a member today. RB: Well, at least if you pay attention to The New York Times. I was charmed by their initial close proximity which was brought to some fruition much later. The Millions: I want to start by asking you about the things not said in Kingdom Cons, the unnamed countries, cities, and even characters. How did you come to select this book by Yuri Herrera for the interview? Weeks ago, I had ordered a copy at Brazos from his Spanish publisher, Editorial Periférica, but was waiting to get my copy at his signing. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. RB: You gave me the impression that you aren’t required to read any particular writer. And, of course, it’s told in pieces. RB: When you begin, do you know what is going to happen? EP: I have written 250 short pieces, not all fiction. But corridos are not a genre that emerged with the War on Drugs, it has been around for a long time, and very often has been a way in which stories out of the mainstream have circulated. EP: I am. I go to festivals. Keep Writing!! At this point I feel like I’ve probably read enough. RB: Wow. RB: Dickens makes appearances in a number of contemporary novels — Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. RB: They had all been previously published somewhere? Wilmington? It’s being narrowed by all sorts of things. Story collections are a delight because despite what is usually a deliberate sequence you can go through and begin with titles that you find appealing. He pauses and squints his eyes. RB: The percentage may not be the different but the cause may be and thus the hold it has on our civilization may be different — more tenuous. I can’t remember which one. Yuri explains that he considered himself a writer even before starting studies at the Universidad Nacional y Autónoma de México (UNAM). RB: That’s the Frankfurt Book Fair. I recognize his face and glasses, but he doesn’t see me. The editor doesn’t respond. Yuri Herrera was born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970. I ask: does he know the ending for a story before he starts writing? Of the writers of my generation, the one I most admire is Yuri Herrera. [She writes:“My only challenge was to keep from interrupting myself as I read. EP: My daughter used to read novels that way. RB: (Laughs). “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” Yuri Herrera — very excited to dive into this one! RB: It seems there is a renaissance of interest in typewriters. Because it’s a chance to improve them. RB: Do you have any sense that it’s being drowned out? Like the ones you mentioned. Should more novels be small and distilled? In this interview with Avni Sejpal, Yuri Herrera delves into the experience of crossing the Mexico/US border, with particular attention to the different challenges women face while navigating these boundaries. RB: Some writers say they will write stories specifically for a book. Learn how your comment data is processed. Pearlman has published over 250 short fictions and works of non-fiction in all the usual (and some unusual) places, and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, The Pushcart Prize Collection,and The O. Henry Prize Stories Collection. People who read, people who write–. EP: I took a course in college and a course or two in my 30s. And Ben Katchor, he started early. EP: Well, I like best to read Dickens and I read him over and over again. EP: Some kids are ready to read. And not a widespread choice. EP: I thought you asked who I read most or my favorite — at any rate. RB: This recent collection was a collection of stories that already existed? I have three favorite stories in Binocular Vision. A small group of people who love it and don’t care if they are thought of as crazy. YH: I always think my next novel is going to be as long as War and Peace, because I have many notes and I think that once I develop them it is going to be a long breadth book, but then I discover that my notes look a lot like how I want the story to sound, or that they require not more development but more concision and more versatility. “He knew blood, and could see this man’s was different. My grandson is the same way. RB: Are there generalizations with which one can describe short form fiction writers? The body can't always keep up. Yuri speaks excellent English, but we converse in Spanish and Yuri answers most of my questions without pause. Many years ago, the writer Rivka Galchen loaned me Francisco Goldman’s first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens.The musicality and irreverence of the title was equally manifest in the verve of the writing, and in the novel’s searching questions about a … The bizarre, deadly and highly symbolic storming of the US Congress and Senate by Trump supporters, bearing fascist insignia and waving Confederate flags to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, made headline news across the world. Today it would seem passion — people who like reading and literature passionately began to champion the independent bookstore. It was a Tolstoyan tale. Yuri’s Uber is running a few minutes late, so I step into the Fellini Caffe in Rice Village, our agreed meeting place, and order an Americano. He grins and acknowledges that, looking back now, he was probably wrong and perhaps foolish even. EP: I have revisited it often in interviews. To me it sounded like a wonderful life. He then uses an English word to describe his house: he calls it a “shotgun.” I’d never heard the term before, so he describes it in Spanish. The obvious follow up question is: what is the secret to writing a good story? Yuri Herrera writes about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. I ask Yuri about his life in the United States and more specifically New Orleans, where he teaches at Tulane. YH: Translation is a step into the abyss, because it doesn’t matter how “accurate” it is, it will always create a different object, with unexpected meanings. Not perfect but done. This translates roughly to “son of…something not good.”. EP: Yes, we have to have our end not only in mind, but pointed towards, within the story. EP: No, no. RB: Tibor Fischer’s story is particularly amazing. Although I reread 100 Years of Solitude three or four times. As for the other characters, it has to do with the role that the King assigned to them, their names signal the tension between what they might or might not want to do and what power expects from them. EP: Absolutely. RB: Sure, but within the usual window of attention. If the BEA invited me, I would go. Other blood. EP: There is a story by Evelyn Waugh, a novel I can’t remember which one it is. I have been writing for 40 years and this is my fourth book. And I read somewhere that Nabokov wrote his novels that way on 5×8 cards. EP: Yes. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the popularity of narcocorridos and their influence and what it means for a society when people are banned from partaking in something? RB: (Chuckles) You bought the book and haven’t read it. That’s okay. Yuri Herrera studied Political Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, obtained a master's degree in Creative Writing at the University of Texas, El Paso and a Ph.D., 2009, in Hispanic Language and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.He is the editor of the literary magazine El perro and a Mellow Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane University. Life goes on and I write the next story. He never once crosses his arms or legs. However, he believes that the key to his own process is very careful thinking and rumination before he even starts writing. Biography. How does one start? I’ve heard great things. EP: No you didn’t. But I would love to be able to create that kind of respiration, to engage with a tempo that depicts a different pace in which emotions develop. EP: It begins with the Torah being delivered, and so I had hoped that the Torah would always be somewhere in the back of the reader’s mind. But it’s the mother who speaks in the first person. And then over the years they meet. TM: There is one word in Kingdom Cons that I kept coming back to and thinking about in terms of translation: the use of the word “tho” in place of “though.” To me, when I was reading, it was a visual cue to me to remind me that I was existing in Lobo’s world (similar to the way that the verb”‘verse” made me feel when I read Signs Preceding the End of the World.) EP: I started to write the book at three, but I didn’t get any further than the title. RB: I understand. EP: I used to use a Hermes. He mentions his digs have a yard and he shows me a picture on his phone of his adopted dog Max, a rescue. RB: The story’s last two lines were quite powerful. So I trust the translators because I assume they know the readership in this other language much better than me, that they know how to activate those new meanings in the text. RB: Big city life in Baltimore — drugs, unions, corruption, public schools, politics, media. Success frequently is serendipitous. EP: It improves the individual life, I think. Yes there is. It seems that something is over. I was so dazzled by that that I didn’t hear the rest of the question. Plus the optimistic message for the readers, we have bear the costs if we wish to live in a better world. Are big novels just spinning their wheels and wasting everyone’s time? For example, he says, he “could write an entire chapter just so it could include a single word.”, I mention the presence of phonetically-spelled words and expressions in his books’ Spanish versions. The project is important. Does he have an outline? He never once crosses his arms or legs. A shaded table on the patio opens up, we finally get our orders, and finally settle. There are many artists that one can say that about. Yuri Herrera was born in 1970 in Actopan, Mexico.His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award.Herrera earned his PhD at Berkeley and is currently teaching at the University of Tulane in New Orleans. Edith Pearlman: Interesting question. And though I love to read novels and so do my colleagues, I have no wish to write in the long form. RB: In the last few years, I have relaxed my personal rule about finishing books that I begin–, EP: Many of my friends have said that [same] thing to me: “Now, if I don’t like it out it goes.”. EP: Absolutely. Donald Trump’s attempt at a coup was not the first staged by a US president – just the first on US soil. EP: It certainly has. EP: All of those things. I start all over again with the knowledge that I have gotten from the improvisation. They don’t let you do that now. At the time, he worried that studying literature in the academic sense “would unduly influence” his own writing. I tried and was told that the director did mean for you to see it that way. She wasn’t named after Tess of the D’Ubervilles. EP: We have had and we are ruthless with each other. Yuri sits a bit back from the table with his body open to the entire table. In final pages, you learn explicitly that they were lovers once. RB: One writer told me that she submits the draft — her editor sends a back a few notes, which enrage her. YH: In this specific case it is because although I took for my model a very precise space, the border between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and a very precise issue, the criminal stupidity of the “War on Drugs,” designed by different American administrations and followed by several Mexican administrations, the craziness of the powerful was not invented by these criminals, the drug lords, it is something that has always been there. The only way to get through time alive is to spend a lot of it pretending that everything’s fine. I had the experience of standing before 500 people reading my story — all of 499 had come for him. It can be appreciated in many ways. The last time I didn’t feel I got anything new and it made me wonder about past judgments about the book. EP: I would, but I am not a proselytizer. I was in an event in which three short stories were read by three actresses which was a lot of fun. RB: Yes, it’s mentioned in the middle of the story. TM: At one point in Kingdom Cons the news arrives at the Palace that the Artist’s songs have been banned, the DJs get “orders to shut his groove down.” Something similar to this happened across northern Mexico in the early 2000s, city governments implemented bans on narcocorridos, claiming that they would poison the youth by glamorizing the narco lifestyle, a similar critique to one that has been voiced in the United States about gangster rap. YH: In the case of the corridos, the ban of certain songs is a simplification of a very complex phenomenon. Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles The end of it is a about young people and explorers and takes place in Africa — Black Mischief? I was distracted by the card game interlude. I have been doing that for a long time. While avoiding aggressive Texan drivers – a staple of Houston – I recall one last question. Meander? And I try to understand what kind of language, what kind of landscape, what kind of behaviors are organic to that core that generates meaning. I had the luck to be plucked. It won’t last forever, so I am responding to it. I read Lamb with my aunt. RB: Is that the extent of your reading, you just read Dickens? Silences are important because they are the most eloquent part of a creative work in how it allows the readers to reveal themselves when they fill them. EP: Yes, right. Yuri Herrera. And a few weeks later, the writer decides the editor was right (laughs). I guess that is why I can’t write long novels. I feel compelled to keep digging in to the newly published. Mexican author Yuri Herrera discusses his novel Signs Preceding the End of the World ahead of his appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. RB: Working class people have to work hard — frequently taking on second jobs. RB: Do you think the task of literature is to instruct and entertain? Drowned out isn’t the word I would use. TM: I’m interested in the influence of fairytales, folklore, and fables on your writing. I do it for my publisher. EP: Why don’t they have that luxury in their off hours? Sunday, January 17 at 6:00 PM . RB: Why are writers like Alice Munro, William Trevor, and yourself admired in a way that seems different than many writers? RB: Would you say it should be different? In 2016 she won the Best Translated Book Award for Signs Preceding the End of the World. Very interested in diving into a work of nonfiction from him. For every story I find a core around which the rest of the text is going to proliferate, sometimes it is a tension between characters, sometimes it is a dramatic line, like a transformational journey, sometimes it is an atmosphere. RB: This belabors the obvious, but this a world that is far different than what we were raised in. My wife and daughter had tagged along to get a drink and go window-shopping at Rice Village while I did the interview; they make to exit, but Yuri – smiling, warm, and energetic – insists we all sit together. EP: It was a very good typewriter. EP: Well, I take them to my friend, whom I meet every month, who is ruthless with me and I with her. EP: That was a riff on Magwitch in Great Expectations. So often I wanted to stop and say to the audience, ‘Did you hear that? Is risk the main reason to be an artist? I think that’s what reading may become. EP: Thank you very much for putting me in that threesome. RB: For some reason, the 3200 comes up in a few stories. He pauses for some time, his eyes dart up, and he tilts his head from side to side subtly. I don’t think they need much teaching and I was one of those. I lost track of why the card game devolved to the temple and presentation ceremony. The following are edited excerpts of the interview. It was luck. That’s what I think anyway.” Do you agree with the King and Scott McClanahan. EP: It is something that clings to you and that you fall in love with. RB: In the course of your writing career I read that you had written over 250 stories. RB: I am disturbed by that — I am reluctantly drawn into thinking about the business part of book publishing. The Beyond the Bars category is open to incarcerated juveniles nationwide, with no entry fee (one entry per person). EP: No, that’s what the destruction of Jewry was about. He graciously takes his dirty plate and cup into the café to save the waiter a trip, and then I offer him a ride to the reading. On the other hand, booksellers were beatified as if they weren’t merchants and capitalists. Mesha Maren EP: My husband plays early music — he plays the viola de gamba as an amateur. It’s a nice alternative to fiction. That short fiction writers are looked as artisans? Why else be an artist?” When I read this, it reminded me of something that another writer I know, Scott McClanahan, said recently in an interview. RB: There is this meme of the educated working class guy who finishes his shift on the assembly line and goes home and picks up William Faulkner. I work with people who don’t read — 35 year olds who play video games. For example, characters say “Usté” instead of the proper Usted. Why indeed? They had previously been published in magazines. At one point you felt the story was finished. There were 16 stories that had never been collected. We know what we are and we’re good with it. He admits that, while writing, he has an outline, but things can and do shift with frequency. I like words and phrases and paragraphs that do several things at a time. EP: Did you ever hear Danny Kaye’s comment when he became a success and somebody said he was an overnight sensation? Has written three novels, all of them translated into several languages: Trabajos del reino, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo, and La transmigración de los cuerpos; which have been published in English by And Other Stories.He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Tulane, in New Orleans. Yuri speaks excellent English, but we converse in Spanish and Yuri answers most of my questions without pause. Mexican writer Yuri Herrera is the author of the novels Trabajos del reino [Kingdom Cons], (2004), Señales que precederán al fin del mundo [Signs Preceding the End of the World] (2009), and La transmigración de los cuerpos [The Transmigration of Bodies] (2013).All three novels were published by Lisa Dillman. I was watching one writer listening to her own story — she said later all she could hear were the infelicities. EP: You were going to tell me the third story you liked. There are very few movies I don’t like. There are writers absolutely as good as I am or better who write their books and don’t get noticed. Sure there were 16 stories that had never been collected into the Café got better since you wrote it letters. Lamb were you a fully engaged reader good story you chose to have a non-fiction group of and! Saying Hijo de la chingada very fast to purge dark things, but didn! I forget the sadness of the D ’ Ubervilles finished writing a mystery with... The readers, we finally get our orders, and fables on your career... They Grew or– it pretending that everything ’ s a chance to improve them the interview the. Excavate old and new suffering that needs to be attended to Spanish and Yuri answers most of questions... 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