Published in 2021
136 pages
Mariana Oliver was born in Mexico City in 1986. She received her master’s in comparative literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and is the recipient of a Fundacíon de Letras Mexicanas grant for essay writing. In 2016, she was awarded the José Vasconcelos National Essay Prize for Migratory Birds.
What is this book about?
In her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between real cities and other more inaccessible territories: language, memory, pain, desire, and the body. With an abiding curiosity and poetic ease, Oliver leads us through the underground city of Cappadocia, explores the vicissitudes of a Berlin marked by historical fracture, recalls a shocking childhood exodus, and recreates the intimacy of the spaces we inhabit. Blending criticism, reportage, and a travel writing all her own, Oliver presents a brilliant collection of essays that asks us what it means to leave the familiar behind and make the unfamiliar our own.
