First Deep Vellum Book Signing: Carmen Boullosa’s TEXAS

Discerning readers of the not-updated-frequently-enough Deep Vellum Twitter account may have noticed yesterday’s post of the Publishers Marketplace announcement that we have signed Carmen Boullosa’s newest novel Texas (Mexico, Alfaguara, 2013) for worldwide English distribution. This will be Boullosa’s fourth novel in English, the three previous novels in English were published by the legendary Grove Press.

World Literature Today reviewed Texas in its May issue. From the review:

Through the intricate plot and multitude of characters, both principal and peripheral, Carmen Boullosa’s novel Texas seems to score a direct hit. The subtitle, La Gran Ladronería en el Lejano Norte(The greatest theft in the far north), speaks to the deep-seated feelings of frustration, anger, and indignation Mexicans held and still hold regarding the heavy-handed treatment meted out to them during the United States’ territorial expansion west and south during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These emotional feelings rising from injustices suffered at the time, and since, give substance to the totality of this novel.

If you’re not yet familiar with Boullosa’s brilliant writing, check out Cleopatra Dismounts, They’re Cows, We’re Pigs, and Leaving Tabasco, or this in-depth interview with her by Rubén Gallo in BOMB Magazine from 2001, or her interview of Roberto Bolaño from BOMB in 2002; her pieces from Words Without Borders; her appearance on the Two Lines podcast from 2011 with Pura Lopez Colome; or translator Samantha Schnee’s recommendation of Boullosa’s writing to the Women in Translation column on She Writes for a list of reasons why you should read Boullosa now, before Texas comes out and blows your mind!

The remaining three titles that we have signed to make up our inaugural list of titles will all be announced very soon, but we couldn’t help ourselves, and leaked this a bit to let the industry know we exist and to let you all know how excited we are to start bringing books out in 2014.