Apparitions

Two nuns, and one obsessed mother, doing everything thing in their power to achieve communion with the one they love. Sister Lugarda de la Encarnación takes the lash, and an unnamed mother gets down on her hands and knees—sacramental postures demanded by inscrutable men. Apparitions is a novel of ecstasy pursued, desire transmogrified into devotion, and obedience as a passionately pursued, not entirely free choice. Erotic, and suffused with painting, music, art, it’s an incantatory exploration of what it means to abandon the world, and to use your body—in pain, and in pleasure—as a way of finally coming to know the divine.

About the Author :
Margo Glantz fused Yiddish literature, Mexican culture, and French tradition to create experimental new works of literature. Glanz graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1953 and earned a doctorate in Hispanic literature from the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Mexico to teach literature and theater history at UNAM. A prolific essayist, she is best known for her 1987 autobiography Las genealogías (The Genealogies), which blended her experiences of growing up Jewish in Catholic Mexico with her parents’ immigrant experiences. She also wrote fiction and nonfiction that shed new light on the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Among her many honours, she won the Magda Donato Prize for Las genealogías and received a Rockefeller Grant (1996) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998).She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (2005), the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (2010), and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2011). Glantz was awarded the 2004 National Prize for Sciences and the prestigious FIL Prize in 2010. She received Chile’s Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award in 2015. Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish. Her recent translations include Beyond Mestizaje: Contemporary Debates on Race in Mexico edited by Tania Islas Weinstein and Milena Ang (2024), Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez (2023) and The Remains by Margo Glantz (shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023). Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022). Her short fiction has appeared in LitroMagazine , Slug and The London Magazine .

Review :
"Glantz’s writing is raw and vulnerable, much like the women she writes about. This complex portrait of all-consuming desire is tough to shake." —Publishers Weekly "Apparitions is short, complex, unusual and abounding in breathtaking descriptions: reading it exposes us to an almost mortal risk." —Mónica Mansour "Margo Glantz has constructed a powerful and ambiguous novel." —Rocío Silva-Santisteban "I believe that with this book Glantz has renewed the genre (...). She has recovered the pristine nakedness of the body and the energy of its most secret drives." —Augusto Roa Bastos , author of I THE SUPREME "A bold and unclassifiable novel that combines audacity with a traditional vision of relationships, not only sexual, between men and women, involving both the mystical tradition and the author's interest in the figure of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz." —Publishers Weekly "Glantz writes about and from the body, exploring through words the limits of meaning to make literature the deepest of joys." —El Mundo "Margo Glantz uses the model of the erotic novel to subvert it with an existential component, and dialogues across time with Pasolini, Kawabata and Bataille." —infoLibre "Inspired by the erotic tradition of mysticism, Margo Glantz explores the limits of the female body; between the dark and the profane, the beautiful and the disturbing (...) The novel (...) is always accompanied by music, which turns the writing into a marvellous score." —La Vanguardia "An icon in Latin American literature and feminism, few things seem to hold back the Mexican writer Margo Glantz. " —El Español