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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

We're here today to talk about a rather remarkable anthology, which is called The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction.

I'm here with its editor, Alvaro Uribe,

and with one of the writers in the anthology,

Christina Rivera Garza.

And we're, well, first of all, I want to say that it's a very fine anthology.

Nothing that you would expect.

In other words, it's not a book about international relations, about border crossings, about the fiction of politics, the writing

has been chosen because it is writing.

Each of these writers, there are 16 of them, was brand new to me and all of the stories in

this book have never been translated into English before. The publisher of the book is

Donkey Archive and those who know Donkey Archive know that the everyday is not what they are

interested in as publishers. They're interested in the extraordinary. So Alvaro Uribe,

let's begin. Tell me how the choices were made for this anthology.

They were difficult choices because there's many, there were some criteria, very general

criteria established.

It had to be writers born from 1945 on, that means living and active writers.

...