Made possible by the Drue Heinz Trust
“As in her hallucinatory and inventive fiction, Luiselli proves her skill as a storyteller while grappling with her own questions of nationalism.”
THE NEW YORKER
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City. Her critically acclaimed narrative Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions has been described as a call to action and “vital for understanding the crisis that immigrants to the U.S. are facing” (Publisher’s Weekly).
Luiselli is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth and Faces in the Crowd, and the essay collection Sidewalks. Tell Me How It Ends was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s and McSweeney’s. Luiselli has earned the title of one of the 20 best Mexican writers under 40, as well as National Book Foundation’s ‘5 under 35’ award.
Tell Me How It Ends is structured around the forty questions Valeria Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation. Her writing humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.
More about Valeria Luiselli
Vanity Fair, March 2016
Married Mexican Writers Álvaro Enrigue and Valeria Luiselli on Their Buzzy New Novels and New York Life
The New York Times, April 2017
A Life in 40 Questions: Harrowing Stories of Child Migration
Fresh Air on NPR, April 2017
‘Tell Me How It Ends’ Offers A Moving, Humane Portrait Of Child Migrants
“Luiselli’s awareness of a story’s ability to restrict informs the book’s judicious use of these children’s lives, as well as its quietly brilliant structure as a series of responses to the questionnaire, which Luiselli describes as a reflection of ‘a colder, more cynical and brutal reality.’ … The account that emerges has no fixed origin, and the crisis, as Luiselli wisely points out, belongs not to any specific country or countries but to all of us living in this corner of the world.”
NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
Book Signing
Join us in the Music Hall Foyer after the lecture to get your book signed or personalized. Classic Lines will have books for sale.
Underwritten by The Pittsburgh Foundation
Funding for this lecture was provided by the John H. Fox Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation.
