Heavens on Earth

From Carmen Boullosa, winner of Mexico’s prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Award, comes Heavens on Earth, a testament to the power of the written word in transcending political, racial, and cultural barriers to create and preserve history. Lear, officially known as 24, lives in L’Atlàntide, a utopian post-apocalyptic society placing increasing limits on the use of language. Steadfast in her resistance to new regulations and pressure to conform, Lear continues to transcribe the writings of Don Hernando, a 16th century Indian priest, and of Estela in the 20th century, an early translator of Don Hernando’s work. Though separated by time and space, Lear and Estela find strength in Hernando’s words, ultimately rebelling against their respective societies in a struggle for remembrance.

Cloud Atlas meets Savage Detectives in Carmen Boullosa’s Heavens on Earth as three narratives thread together in a captivating exploration of memory, language, and humanity.

Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. Her most recent novel Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, and won Typographical Era’s Translation Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico.

Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. She has published over a dozen novels, two of which were designated the Best Novel Published in Mexico by the prestigious magazine Reforma--her second novel, Before, also won the renowned Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel; and her novel La otra mano de Lepanto was also selected as one of the Top 100 Novels Published in Spanish in the past 25 years. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award, was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award, and has been nominated for the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award. Boullosa has received numerous prizes and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship. Also a poet, playwright, essayist, and cultural critic, Boullosa is a Distinguished Lecturer at City College of New York, and her books have been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian.

Shelby Vincent received her PhD in Literary Translation from the University of Texas at Dallas’s School of Arts and Humanities in 2015. She is currently translating another of Boullosa’s novels entitled The Virgin and the Violin, which is loosely based on the female Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola, and which Deep Vellum will publish in 2018.