Faces in the Crowd

Reviews

“Luiselli’s haunting debut novel…erodes the concrete borders of everyday life with a beautiful, melancholy contemplation of disappearance…Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition.”

“Lovely and mysterious.”

“An extraordinary new literary talent.”

“Luiselli’s novel stands apart from most Latin American fiction. She avoids worn-out narratives about drug wars and violence, and her downbeat supernaturalism feels quite different from the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. Concerned, above all, with literature’s ability to transcend time and space, Faces in the Crowd signals the appearance of an exciting female voice to join a new wave of Latino writers.”

“Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd is like nothing I’ve read in a while…Its musings on obsession and ambition are haunting, and its sense of place is fantastic.”

“Reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño and André Gide, Luiselli navigates a dynamic, ghostly world between worlds, crisscrossing fact and fiction. Few books are as sure to baffle, surprise, and reward readers as the strange, shifty experiment that is Luiselli’s fiction debut.”

“In part a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this deceptively modest-seeming, astonishingly inventive novel creates an extraordinary intimacy, a sensibility so alive it quietly takes over all your senses, quivering through your nerve endings, opening your eyes and heart. Youth, from unruly student years to early motherhood and a loving marriage—and then, in the book’s second half, wilder and something else altogether, the fearless, half-mad imagination of youth, I might as well call it—has rarely been so freshly, charmingly, and unforgettably portrayed. Valeria Luiselli is a masterful, entirely original writer.”

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