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Book Title

Ten Planets

Subtitle
Stories
Author 1
Yuri Herrera; Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
Body

The characters that populate Yuri Herrera’s surprising new story collection inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions and Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, these very short stories are an inspired extension of this significant writer’s work.

In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meager bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Yuri Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition.

In Ten Planets, Herrera’s consistent themes—the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms—are explored with evident brilliance and delight.

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List Price
$15.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-223-3
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
120
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
A collection of fanciful, philosophical science fictions by “one of Mexico’s finest novelists” (Vulture)

 

About the Author

Yuri  Herrera
Credit: Lisbeth Salas
Born in Actopan, Mexico, Yuri Herrera is the author of three novels, including Signs Preceding the End of the World, as well as the collection Ten Planets, which was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.
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Lisa Dillman lives in Decatur, Georgia, where she translates Spanish-language fiction and teaches at Emory University. Her recent translations include National Book Award finalist Abyss by Pilar Quintana and Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera.
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Praise

  • Shortlisted for the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
    A Southwest Review Must-Read Book of 2023
  • “[A] highly original set of voyages to imaginary worlds that shed unexpected light on our own.”—Liz Braswell, The Wall Street Journal
  • “Reading Ten Planets . . . requires not only suspension of disbelief but surrender of control. Both are challenging; both are worth it. Nobody writes like Yuri Herrera, and it would be a shame not to travel with him as far as his imagination can go.”—Lily Meyer, NPR.org
  • “Herrera’s writing moves through different registers with ease, some familiar, some uncanny . . . all of it unlikely and beautiful. In Ten Planets, Herrera shifts from the fantastical (monsters and aliens) to the eerily materialist (a bacterium achieves sentience) like a boy flipping through the pages of a beloved comic book: with delight and conviction.”—Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub
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