This is Not Miami

Product Information

Por otro lado, los relatos de Melchor están soberbiamente trabajados, uno se vuelve un fetichista de la palabra con su mera introducción, y es que, ofrece una escritura muy bien pulida, cuidada, y consciente de saber cómo dotar con una gran tensión narrativa cada una de las historias que va desgajando en este libro. De esta forma, no hay naúsea, o al menos, se vuelve tolerable, se soporta porque a pesar de lo terrible de las historias, uno no puede dejar de leer.

The Zetas also maintained control of Veracruz through high-level corruption. Herrera, the state governor from 2004 to 2010, worked with the criminal organization, enriching himself and putting local police forces at the disposal of the Zetas. His successor, Javier Duarte de Ochoa, embezzled funds on a truly massive scale. These governors made Veracruz the most dangerous state in the country for journalists. In 2016, the year that Duarte left office, the largest mass grave in Mexico was discovered in Veracruz. It contained over 300 skulls. The fable-like narrative chops between different time periods, a plethora of characters and references to Korean folklore. It is a shame that it took until January of this year to get an English translation, because Whale is an enchanting epic that fully deserves its place on this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist. Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv

Few places reverberate so noisily with the ghosts of their history as the English seaside resort,” writes Madeleine Bunting. The country’s coastline is spattered with towns – Felixstowe, Scarborough, Weston-super-Mare, New Brighton – that were once elegant but now include areas of severe deprivation. It's honestly a fantastic collection -Melchor is a fantastic writer, one with an ear for dialogue and an eye for detail, both of which lead to her creating incredibly engaging pieces. Almost all of them could have been extended, teased out into longer pieces, and the brevity of some of the articles here might leave many readers wanting more. For me, they were close to perfect. It's hard to understand where this refusal to succumb to despair comes from: these stories depict prison life, poverty, casual cruelties where women kill and mutilate their children, where a rapist is lynched by the family of his victim, a terrifying story of a haunted house - and yet somewhere there is a resistance to simply folding and giving up under the weight of so much misery and desolation. For a few years, the impact of the Zetas on Veracruz, and on Mexico itself, was so profound that they changed the vernacular, the way people spoke. A culture of joyful conversing and barroom braggadocio learned silence and circumspection. I know that subjectivity and journalism are not the easiest bedfellows, and that some of my crónica run the risk of reading like straightforward works of fiction, despite my best efforts to convince you otherwise. I can only assure the reader that my intention when writing them was always to tell a story with the maximum amount of detail and the minimum amount of noise, and that the words I use derive from my sources’own insider accounts, from my total and sometimes brazen exploitation of their observations, and, of course, from my own involvement in the events and places described."

In her third book ‘This is not Miami’, Melchor uses the form of ‘crónicas’ - unique to Latin American writing, a blend of reportage, narrative non-fiction using novelistic forms. These short stories, if you will, are all based on fact.

Advance Praise

Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’