Folk fairy tales are populated with violent sadists, monstrous figures who take their hatred out on those closest to them: there is the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” who fattens the young boy up to make him more appetizing; the stepmother in “The Juniper Tree” who kills her stepson and feeds him to his own father in a delicious stew; “Bluebeard,” whose wives disappear under mysterious circumstances. And then there is the paragraph-long Grimms story of a disobedient child whose hand raises from the ground as he is buried, raising with it the question of whether he is buried alive. The mother gets into the grave, lowers his hand, and then, we are told, he can finally rest peacefully. This year’s International Booker Prize boasts perhaps the most diverse shortlist in its history: its six authors span four continents and two of the books were written in languages that have never been in contention for the prize before. One is Boulder, a compelling Catalan novella that emerged in 2020 and was published in English in August of last year, by the Barcelona-born poet Eva Baltasar, which I wouldn’t bet against to take home the prize. When the story opens, our unnamed narrator is about to board a merchant ship off the coast of Chile. Working as a chef on the voyage, she meets an Icelandic woman, Samsa, and falls in love. After learning the truth behind her belief in extraterrestrials, Melchor says of that belief and those stories: “They were just lies, the inventions of grown-ups.” It is a classic coming-of-age, loss-of-innocence line. But in This Is Not Miami, the lies take a specific form. No particular grown-ups have deceived her—her father found the fascination with UFOs ridiculous—but the world appears as one big lie or cover-up. The incident involving the ambush of federal police was a rare case of the truth evading government censors. I know that subjectivity and journalism are not the easiest bedfellows, and that some of my crónica run the risk of reading like straightforward works of fiction, despite my best efforts to convince you otherwise. I can only assure the reader that my intention when writing them was always to tell a story with the maximum amount of detail and the minimum amount of noise, and that the words I use derive from my sources’own insider accounts, from my total and sometimes brazen exploitation of their observations, and, of course, from my own involvement in the events and places described."

These learned ways of speaking pervade This Is Not Miami. The final relato is entitled “Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta,” a variant on a familiar formulation for talking about areas under the dominion of the Zetas (zeta is the Spanish word for the letter z). Óscar Martínez’s 2016 book A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, for example, contains a chapter called “Guatemala Is Spelled with a Z.” It's hard to understand where this refusal to succumb to despair comes from: these stories depict prison life, poverty, casual cruelties where women kill and mutilate their children, where a rapist is lynched by the family of his victim, a terrifying story of a haunted house - and yet somewhere there is a resistance to simply folding and giving up under the weight of so much misery and desolation.

Advance Praise

PDF / EPUB File Name: This_Is_Not_Miami_-_Fernanda_Melchor.pdf, This_Is_Not_Miami_-_Fernanda_Melchor.epub Seamlessly translated by Sophie Hughes from the initial Spanish, This Is Not Miami is a compelling read. However, be warned; these tales may well devour your dreaming.’ The writing is never ostentatious, never dramatic or 'look at me' even when describing outrageous events (and a shout-out to Sophie Hughes for such a natural translation) but this is powerful stuff.

The city cannot tell its own story, or any story at all. As Sartre pointed out, reality does not tell stories; that is the job of language and memory. In her third book ‘This is not Miami’, Melchor uses the form of ‘crónicas’ - unique to Latin American writing, a blend of reportage, narrative non-fiction using novelistic forms. These short stories, if you will, are all based on fact. Muchos de los personajes han aparecido en el periódico local, algunos por diferentes razones, como la bella Evangelina Tejera, que fue reina del Carnaval de Veracruz y más tarde apareció envilecida ante la opinión pública por haber matado a sus dos hijos. Whale, originally published in 2003 and considered a classic of Korean magic realism, is a rich, three-part novel that centres on a young woman, Geumbok. Inspired by the “unbelievable sight” of a blue whale cresting out of the ocean, Geumbok decides to build a cinema in her village that resembles “a large whale breaching the surface for a breath”.

Skillfully translated by Hughes, this is a book that’s as gorgeous as it is dark, and it proves that Melchor is one of the finest writers working today. Absolutely stunning.’ It's honestly a fantastic collection -Melchor is a fantastic writer, one with an ear for dialogue and an eye for detail, both of which lead to her creating incredibly engaging pieces. Almost all of them could have been extended, teased out into longer pieces, and the brevity of some of the articles here might leave many readers wanting more. For me, they were close to perfect. Pocos son los libros que te toman del cuello y no te sueltan. Fernanda Melchor (1982) y su “Aquí no es Miami” (2013) es, sin lugar a dudas, uno de ellos.

The Zetas also maintained control of Veracruz through high-level corruption. Herrera, the state governor from 2004 to 2010, worked with the criminal organization, enriching himself and putting local police forces at the disposal of the Zetas. His successor, Javier Duarte de Ochoa, embezzled funds on a truly massive scale. These governors made Veracruz the most dangerous state in the country for journalists. In 2016, the year that Duarte left office, the largest mass grave in Mexico was discovered in Veracruz. It contained over 300 skulls.In the 1970s, new feminist versions of folklore and fairy tale began to appear in which the silenced female figures at their heart could be seen and reclaimed. These retellings were driven by a conviction that the creativity of these tales could be rescued from their violence. But Melchor is not interested in this. Instead, she frames folklore and fairy tale within contemporary scenes of violence to show the role they continue to play in mediating what is most unbearable. Tóth is adept at conjuring atmosphere from small details and refined descriptions – the body of an old man, she writes, is “a vacant house, a hollow puppet, who had returned to the dwelling place of the soul”. Rombo 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.’ Melchor evokes the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Impressive.’