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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Eccentric Embodiment: Valeria Luiselli and Guadalupe Nettel in Conversation with Magdalena Edwards

February23 at Mark Taper Auditorium, Central Library, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, CA


The eccentric fictional worlds of authors Valeria Luiselli and Guadalupe Nettel come alive on the ALOUD stage as these two leading voices in contemporary Mexican literature meet to share recent work. Luiselli, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and two-time recipient of the Los Angeles Times’ Book Prizes will share The Story of My Teeth, an imaginative odyssey through Mexico City’s art world and industrial suburbs. Guadalupe Nettel, voted one of the most important Latin American writers at the Bogotá Hay Festival, playfully illuminates human obsessions in her short fiction Natural Histories, and narrates her unconventional childhood in the autobiographical novel, The Body Where I Was Born.


This will be a bilingual program (English/Spanish).


Valeria Luiselli
was born Mexico City and 1983 and grew up in South Africa. A novelist (Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth) and essayist (Sidewalks), her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta, and McSweeney’s. In 2014, Faces in the Crowd was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction. She lives in New York City.


The New York Times described Guadalupe Nettel’s acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories, as “five flawless stories.” A Bogotá 39 author and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer,” Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and most recently the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born is her highly anticipated first novel to appear in English. She lives and works in Mexico City.


Magdalena Edwards
’ writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Millions, and El Mercurio. She is translating Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel The Chandelier from Portuguese for New Directions, a project that took her to Yaddo. A contributing editor at LARB and an Artist Resident in Motherhood, Magdalena is completing a literary memoir In the Middle of the Road: Traveling with Elizabeth Bishop, Clarice Lispector, and Raúl Zurita and translating, from Spanish, Chilean surrealist Juan Emar’s posthumous novel Love. She holds a BA in Social Studies from Harvard and a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA.

February23, 7.15pm

630 W 5th St
Los Angeles, CA 90071 United States