The Queen of Swords - by Jazmina Barrera (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Originally published as: La reina de espadas"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro (1916-1988), Jazmina Barrera's deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life.

Sifting through the writer's archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research--the correspondence, photos, and books--serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work.Who was Elena Garro, really?

She was a writer, a founder of "magical realism," a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and theI Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination.

The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.

Review Quotes

Longlisted for the National Book Award

Indie Next Pick

"This neo-bio is a total pleasure. I'd never known Elena Garro and now I'm riveted by the entire morphing fact of her. Jazmina Barrera's take is intimate and playful, and transgressive in the ways we generally get condemned to when considering a life, especially a literary and a female one. Here we splash dramatically, surrounded by Garro Barrera's obsessions, toys, affairs, homes, animal friends, the works. It's a joyous brainy blast and I'm intrigued and changed byThe Queen of Swords as a reader and a writer."--Eileen Myles

"A prismatic portrait of an elusive woman."--Kirkus

"Barrera's poetic and searching prose, her description of the experience of doing archival research, her comfort with her own uncertainty around the very facts of Elena's life--together articulated loving an artist from a different time better than any other book I've read. . . . The clarity of Barrera's fascinations inspires me to love even more completely than I already do. Her books teach me how to love and how to live with loss. I loved it I loved it I loved it!"--Ellis Breunig, Page 2 Books

Praise for Cross-Stitch

"Needlework is often depicted as a peaceful activity: feminine, unthreatening, decorative. Yet in Jazmina Barrera's understated and lovely debut novel, Cross-Stitch, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, embroidery is revealed to be as quietly brutal as young womanhood, despite the shroud of innocence society often places over both."--The New York Times

"Reflections on youth, the passage of time, and the meaning of female friendship....[Jazmina Barrera] blend[s] Sally Rooney-esque interpersonal chaos with a clean, graceful prose style."--Vogue

"Stitches, secrets, shame: When Jazmina Barrera's first novel translated into English, Cross-Stitch, hits shelves in November, read it. Barrera stitches a female coming-of-age story together with a feminist history and theory of embroidery, and it consumed my entire day."--Chicago Review of Books

Praise for Linea Nigra

"When interpreting pregnancy through art, no starting point is better than the musings of the Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera....To call [Linea Nigra] a memoir would be reductive--it includes so many references to fine art, literature, and history that it functions almost as an anthology or a masterfully curated museum of child-rearing." --The Atlantic

"Linea Nigra is a beautiful and lucid essay about the journey across motherhood seasons - pregnancy, childbirth, and first months of parenting. Far from mythologizing motherhood as an idealized state, Linea Nigra sheds light on the complex and contradictory nature of gestation: a state crossed by terrors, but also by hopes and love; a biological and spiritual mystery that concerns all human beings, as individuals and as a society." --Fernanda Melchor, The Guardian

"Clear-eyed and poetic...[A] generous, openhearted project inviting readers to discover what is often hidden away, unseen." --Los Angeles Review of Books