Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor is “one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices” (The Guardian). Her novel Hurricane Season was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Sophie Hughes has also translated José Revueltas and Enrique Vila-Matas for New Directions. She was shortlisted for the 2019 and 2020 International Booker Prize.
"With a nimble command of the novel’s technical resources and an
uncanny grasp of the irrational forces at work in society, the
books navigate a reality riven by violence, race, class, and sex…
In Melchor’s world, there’s no resisting the violence, much less
hating it. All a novelist can do, she seems to suggest, is take a
long, unsparing look at the hell that we’ve made."
*Juan Gabriel Vásquez - The New Yorker*
"Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal
novel. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch
for orality, and a neurosurgeon’s precision for cruelty. Paradais
is a short inexorable descent into Hell."
*Mariana Enriquez*
"Paradais is beautiful and terrible."
*Marcus McGee - LARB*
"Melchor’s prose is singular, with its fair share of page-long
sentences that travel from the deepest psychic corners of her
characters to the broadest panoramas of Mexican life."
*Leland Cheuk - National Public Radio*
"Melchor’s brilliant, sinewy, streetwise second novel turns on a
couple of young men in a Mexican town whose lusts take a violent
turn...Melchor’s telling is psychologically revealing, finding ever
deeper reservoirs of rage and dread in its characters."
*Mark Athitakis - The Los Angeles Times*
"Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais is brutal poetry, distilled."
*Literary Hub*
"Paradais warns against considering any luxurious abode as “safe”
when the mere existence of such enclaves intensifies the
inequalities that will eventually lead to their own
demise. "
*CrimeReads*
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