Virtual Event: Caren Beilin and Cristina Rivera Garza

Havard Book Store, Third Place Books, Community Bookstore, and Brazos Bookstore welcome authors CAREN BEILIN and CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA for a discussion of their respective books Revenge of the Scapegoat and New and Selected Stories. They will be joined in conversation by DANIELLE DUTTON, author of Margaret the First.

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About Revenge of the Scapegoat

In the tradition of Rabelais, Swift, and Fran Ross—the tradition of biting satire that joyfully embraces the strange and fantastical—and drawing upon documentary strategies from Sheila Heti, Caren Beilin offers a tale of familial trauma that is also a broadly inclusive skewering of academia, the medical industry, and the contemporary art scene.

One day Iris, an adjunct at a city arts college, receives a terrible package: recently unearthed letters that her father had written to her in her teens, in which he blames her for their family’s crises. Driven by the raw fact of receiving these devastating letters not once but twice in a lifetime, and in a panic of chronic pain brought on by rheumatoid arthritis, Iris escapes to the countryside—or some absurdist version of it. Nazi cows, Picassos used as tampons, and a pair of arthritic feet that speak in the voices of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet are standard fare in this beguiling novel of odd characters, surprising circumstances, and intuitive leaps, all brought together in profoundly serious ways.

About New and Selected Stories

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018 about Cristina Rivera Garza, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: She was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction that “interrogates culturally constructed notions of language, memory, and gender from a transnational perspective,” and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

New and Selected Stories now brings together in English translation stories from across Rivera Garza’s career, drawing from three collections spanning over 30 years and including new writing not yet published in Spanish. It is a unique and remarkable body of work, and a window into the ever-evolving stylistic and thematic development of one of the boldest, most original and affecting writers in the world today.

Praise for Revenge of the Scapegoat

"Caren Beilin’s slim novels are marked by a distinctive dizzying logic—as if she had invented her own variation on realism—that allows the narrators’ imaginations, feelings, locations on earth, and personal symbologies to stretch and twist the plot." —Sheila Heti, Paris Review Daily

“Revenge of the Scapegoat made me bounce-laugh so hard my cheeks and belly kept jiggling while reading the pains. The pains that are so impossible and absurd that Caren Beilin writes them as full characters with their own interior agency. I’d never thought of our pains having their own lives, but I see it now, and hopefully I’ll be able to live with my various physical and emotional pains in a better way. Thank you, Caren.” —Steven Dunn

Praise for New and Selected Stories

“Cristina Rivera Garza’s New and Selected Stories offers English-language readers access to more than 30 years of intriguing writing by one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary authors.” —Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

“This hypnotic, riveting collection of new and previously published stories from MacArthur Fellow Rivera Garza takes on love, migration, and violence. . . . These unsettling yet deeply approachable stories ought to earn Rivera Garza the wider attention she deserves.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review