Wed 11/12 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

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The Queen of Swords Tour: Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell on Elena Garro
Author Jazmina Barrera, on tour from Mexico City, and translator Megan McDowell join forces to discuss the life and work of Elena Garro through Barrera’s biography, The Queen of Swords (longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature), and McDowell’s translation of her short stories, The Week of Colors.

About The Queen of Swords
In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro (1916-1988), Jazmina Barrera’s deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life. Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research—the correspondence, photos, and books—serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work.Who was Elena Garro, really?

She was a writer, a founder of “magical realism”, a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and the I Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination.

The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.

About The Week of Colors
Published in tandem with The Queen of Swords, The Week of Colors makes the short stories of Elena Garro, the “cursed mother of magical realism” (El Mundo), available in English for the first time.

With The Week of Colors, Elena Garro laid the groundwork for the literary movements that would shape the landscape of Latin American fiction and beyond. Here you’ll find the early roots of magical realism, feminist horror, and anticolonial speculative fiction. In this volume, Garro highlights the violence in our history, our homes, and our hearts, in vivid color.

Jazmina Barrera’s books have been published in nine countries and translated to English, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and French. Her book Cuerpo extraño (Foreign Body) was awarded the Latin American Voices prize by Literal Publishing, and On Lighthouses was chosen for the Indie Next list by IndieBound. Linea Nigra was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Autobiography Prize, CANIEM’s Book of the Year award, and the Amazon Primera Novela (First Novel) Award. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City.

Elena Garro (1916–1998) was a novelist, playwright, short story writer, journalist, and the inventor of magical realism, though she rejected the term as “a cheap marketing label.” The author of over 40 books, she wrote about the violence embedded in everyday life, with a focus on children, women, and indigenous people.

Megan McDowell has translated work by many of the most important contemporary Latin American writers, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Fonseca, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award for Writing in Translation, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize, and shortlisted once for the Kirkus Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.

This event is co-sponsored by Two Lines Press, Princeton University Library Special Collections, Princeton' Program in Latin American Studies, and Labyrinth Books.