Yuri Herrera reads from The Transmigration of Bodies at Maple Street on July 20

Maple Street Books will host Yuri Herrera on Wednesday, July 20, at 6 p.m. to celebrate the release of his newly translated book, The Transmigration of Bodies, at their storefront (7529 Maple Street).

Herrera will be reading from the novel in both Spanish and English and signing copies of the book. His previous book, Signs Preceding the End of the World, recently won the Best Translated Book Award and will also be available.

The Transmigration of Bodies is a response to the violence of contemporary Mexico. With echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Roberto Bolano and Raymond Chandler, this novel is a noirish tragedy and a tribute to those bodies – loved, sanctified, lusted after, and defiled – that violent crime has touched.

A plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the city’s underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage.

Yuri Herrera was born in Actopan, Mexico. He studied politics in Mexico, Creative Writing in El Paso, and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was published to great critical acclaim in 2015 and included in many Best-of-Year lists, including The Guardian’s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books. He is currently teaching at Tulane University.