SIDEWALKS

Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican novelist and non-fiction writer. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the internationally acclaimed novel Faces in the Crowd. Luiselli’s short fiction and non-fiction pieces have appeared in magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s and Dazed and Confused. Her work has been translated to multiple languages, and in 2014 she was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. Her forthcoming novel, The Story of My Teeth, will be available from Coffee House Press in fall 2015.

“Together with [Luiselli's novel] Faces in the Crowd, her essays in Sidewalks are a wonderful contribution to the long tradition by which authors re-imagine their cities as dream-like spaces created for them to wander around, daydream and discover.” —Los Angeles Times

“Luiselli’s writing is full of verve.” —Irish Times

“The disciplines conversed within Sidewalks include cartography, architecture, and urban planning; Luiselli bicycles through Mexico City, strolls the New York City streets, and visits Joseph Brodsky’s grave in Venice. These wanderings are unified by a distinctive narrative voice: pensive, questioning, always something of a stranger in a strange land.”—Publishers Weekly

“If every word, for her, has the shadow of two others behind it, and if every city in which she lives carries the ghostly afterimage of all the other cities she has known — as well as the voices of the writers she has researched upon her arrival — then her books become all the more enthralling for the multiplicity they champion. . . the great beauty of her art is seeing all her contrasting stories collapse or blend or combine into an unexpected whole.” —Los Angeles Review of Books