Norte

Three unconnected men travel north, each passing in isolation over one of the most troubled and controversial dividing lines in the world: the Mexico-US border. But in a melee of language and blood, their stories—of a young serial killer, a graduate student who writes graphic novels, and an outsider artist in a mental institution—gradually begin to coalesce. Daring in both its protagonists and structure, Edmundo Paz Soldan’sNorte is a fast-paced, vivid, and operatic blending of distinct voices. Together, they lay bare the darkness of the line over which these men—like so many others—have passed.

A prominent member of a new generation of Latin American writers, Paz Soldan stands in defiant opposition to the magical realism of the past century, instead grounding his work in political, economic, and historical realities.Norte is no exception; it is a tale of displacement and the very human costs of immigration. Shocking with its violence even as it thrills with its language, confounding rather than cowing under the cliche of the murderous, drug-dealing immigrant,Norte is a disquieting, imperative work—an undeniable reflection of our fragmented modern world.

“A story of uprooting with universal overtones. . . . Constantly passing from one protagonist to another, blurring the frontiers of time, Paz Soldan composes ??this portrait of madness by successive strokes. . . .Norte holds out a disturbing mirror.”—Le Monde

“Norte is Paz Soldan’s best novel.”—El Pais

Born in Bolivia, Edmundo Paz Soldan is professor of Latin American literature at Cornell University. He is the multiple-award-winning author of ten novels and five short story collections, two of which, Turing’s Deliriumand The Matter of Desire, have been translated into English. Valerie Miles is a translator, publisher, writer, and professor for literary translation at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She is currently the codirector ofGranta en espanol and founding editor of the New York Review of Books classics collection in Spanish translation.