15 quotes
People love to classify things as black and white, good or bad, but I’ve seldom met any one who can be neatly defined and classified…
It’s never as fun seeing the monster as much as imagining.
I am partial to quiet, slow, psychologically intricate work.
Noemí’s father said she cared too much about her looks and parties to take school seriously, as if a woman could not do two things at once.
Mexican Gothic (2020)
Mortals have always been frightened of the night's velvet embrace and the creatures that walk in it, and yet they find themselves mesmerized by it.
Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019)
In my experience, the term magic realism is often overused and stereotypical, spoken without much thought.
Saying Goodbye to Magic Realism" essay (2022)
"Words are seeds, Casiopea. With words you embroider narratives, and the narratives breed myths, and there's power in the myth. Yes, the things you name have power."
Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019)
In her spare time, she looked to books or the stars for company.
Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019)
Categories should not act as straitjackets, and yet the magic realism label has sometimes strangled rather than liberated Latin American literature.
Saying Goodbye to Magic Realism" essay (2022)
He'd fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams.
Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019)
But does it matter what we call Latin American literature? Isn’t a rose by any other name just as sweet? In my experience, it matters because categories create expectations.
Saying Goodbye to Magic Realism" essay (2022)
It's probably a lot better to imagine that you can deal with vampires and witches, because at least those, there's some ways to combat them. When you're talking about humans, there are no certain remedies for dealing with a band of roving soldiers.
Interview with NPR (2016)
Growing up in Mexico, we didn't have a dividing line between the fantastical and the literary, like you do in Canada, so it bled through. Therefore, my writing bleeds through categories and I enjoy the challenge of changing constantly, like molting out of a book.
Interview (2017)
Gothic has this slow, moody, syrupy sort of pace. That is what gives gothic its shape.
Interview with Vox (2020)
Magic realism once referred to the literary style of a loosely connected group of Latin American authors who penned works some 60 years ago, but in the English-speaking world, the term has become synonymous with Latin American writing in general. Picture every work by a British writer being called “Austenesque” today, and you get an idea of this phenomenon.
Saying Goodbye to Magic Realism" essay (2022)