La reina de las espadas
Jazmina Barrera

NONFICTION | 2024 | 272 pages

One of the most suggestive Spanish-language writers, winner of the Latin American Voices Prize, reconstructs the life and figure of Elena Garro, an essential 20th-century writer.

As I read, I recognize the feeling that I get from the literature I enjoy the most: that I’m looking through a window and all of a sudden seeing my own reflection in the crystal, like a specter.

This book introduces us to an Elena Garro that perhaps only her closest friends knew. A human Elena, who was, therefore, fallible and multifaceted. In order to trace this magnificent portrait, Jazmina Barrera uses scientific rigor and a sense of humor to thread together a personal collection surrounding the writer: fragments of her work, diaries, letters, and interviews intertwine with quotes from documentaries, files from the Princeton archive’s Elena Garro Papers, and even tarot, I Ching, and astrology sessions.

La reina de las espadas highlights Elena Garro’s peculiar way of inhabiting the world and her capacity to give it new meanings through the things she was obsessed with: time, catastrophe, cats, the peasant struggle, stagings, and trips. There are no certainties or judgments here: only the back and forth of a chameleon-like personality through the passionate, feminist, and intelligent eyes of an investigator who is transformed as her research advances. The acute observation skills that characterize Jazmina Barrera’s writing join her infinite curiosity and her prodigious memory in order to gift us a series of snapshots of a great writer of the 20th century. And by doing so, she proves to be a part of that same lineage.

RIGHTS: spanish (world) LUMEN/PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE | english (north america) TWO LINES PRESS

BY JAZMINA BARRERA:

La reina de espadas
NONFICTION, 2024
Punto de cruz
NOVEL, 2021
Los nombres de los animales
CHILDREN’S, 2021
Linea nigra
ESSAYS, 2020
Cuaderno de faros
ESSAYS, 2017
Cuerpo extraño
ESSAYS, 2013