Author(s): Fernanda Melchor (translated by Sophie Hughes)

Essay | South and Central America | Short Stories | Mexico

Fernanda Melchor blends reportage with her distinctive narrative style in this collection of stories.

Set in and around the city of Veracruz in Mexico, This Is Not Miami delivers twelve devastating stories that spiral from real events. These cronicas-a genre unique to Latin American writing, blending reportage and fiction-probe the motivations of murderers and misfits, compelling us to understand or even empathise with them. Melchor is like a ventriloquist, using a range of distinctive voices to evoke the smells, sounds and words of this fascinating world that includes mistreated women, damaged families, refugees, prisoners and even a beauty queen.As in her hugely acclaimed novels Hurricane Season and Paradais, Fernanda Melchor's masterful stories show how the violent and shocking events that make the headlines are only the surface ruptures of a society on the brink of chaos.

Review:

'Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.'

-- Samanta Schweblin

'Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O'Connor, or Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.'

-- Julian Lucas, The New York Times

'[Hurricane Season and Paradais] establish Melchor...as the latest of Faulkner's Latin American inheritors, and among the most formidable...Melchor's prose is muscular but always attentive to the world of the senses and carried forward by an impeccable ear...She isn't holding a Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican society; she's dissecting its body and its psyche at the same time, unafraid of what she might find.'

-- New Yorker

'Based on a real-life murder in rural Mexico, Fernanda's story paints a powerful, visceral story of a violent world where superstition and suspicion collide. The language - translated into English by Sophie Hughes - is astonishing and hypnotic. Tread carefully; even though this book is narrated by deeply human characters, its portrayal of cycles of abuse, poverty and despair is as unrelenting as it is beautifully crafted.'

-- Michael Williams, Sydney Writers Festival

'Though there are glitters of humour and empathy, Hurricane Season is an uncompromisingly savage piece of work: difficult to escape from, built to shock. Yet it's also elating. I was left buoyed up by Melchor's anger, elated because she had shown me things I needed to be faced with.'

-- Guardian on Hurricane Season

'Melchor's vulgar yet elegant prose crackles with explosive energy...Paradais is a blistering (and blisteringly intelligent) interrogation of privilege and class disparity.'

-- Bram Presser on Paradais
'The stories are acts of rebelliousness and bravery...[Fernanda Melchor] continues to establish herself internationally as one of the strongest new voices in Mexican literature.' * Kill Your Darlings *
'Melchor toggles playfully between true and might be true in a way that is quite provocative...A captivating read.' * RNZ: Nine to Noon *

Author Biography:

Fernanda Melchor was born in 1982 in Veracruz, Mexico. She is widely recognised as one of Mexico's most exciting new voices. She won the Anna-Seghers-Preis and the International Literature Award for Hurricane Season, which was also longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her most recent novel, Paradais, was published in 2022 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. This Is Not Miami is a collection of narrative non-fiction pieces. Melchor's books are published in thirty-four territories. She lives in Mexico.