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Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky's tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the questions embedded in our human landscapes.
"Starred Review. A collection that can't be categorized as memoir or travel writing or literary criticism but cohesively combines such elements and more." - Kirkus
"These essays take an unhurried pace well-suited for the ambling walks and bike rides that inspired them, deepened by literary and historical asides that situate these places in a context beyond the present moment." - Publisher's Weekly
"'A writer is a person who distributes silences and empty spaces.' What a pleasure to wander through Valeria Luiselli's meditative, precisely constructed landscapes of the city and interior. To read her essays is to have access to a map, a history, an passionate library, a thoughtful gaze, a sensitive and beautiful mind." - Kate Zambreno
"In a little over one hundred pages the peripatetic Luiselli covers Mexico City, Venice and New York – amongst others – with a quick eye and a scholar's heart. She is a keen excavator and expositor; the history of places, people, words and ideas are deftly woven together in brief tapestries of a life lived around the world." - Review 31
"Valeria Luiselli is a writer of formidable talent, destined to be an important voice in Latin American letters. Her vision and language are precise, and the power of her intellect is in evidence on every page." - Daniel Alarcón
This information about Sidewalks was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Diego Berruecos/Gatopardo
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She...
Name Pronunciation
Valeria Luiselli: vuh-LAIR-ee-uh loo-SELL-ee
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