Sep
3
11:00pm
Valeria Luiselli on Lost Children Archive with Kali Fajardo-Anstine
By Kweli Journal
"Impossibly smart, full of beauty, heart and insight, Lost Children Archive is a novel about archiving all that we don’t want to lose. It is an ode to sound. Valeria Luiselli looks into the American present as well as its history: into Native American history, and the many intersections between American and Mexican history that are and have always been there. This is a road trip novel that transcends the form, while also being the perfect American road trip novel for right now. Everyone should read this book.” —Tommy Orange
“The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli’s hands—electric, elastic, alluring, new . . . She is a superb chronicler of children: the daughter and son feel piercingly real—perceptive, irreplaceable, wonderfully odd. The book [is] an archive of curiosities, yearnings, animated by the narrator’s restless energy . . . It breaks out of the rhythms of the road trip, into a heart-stopping climax.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
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Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends; and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of The Carnegie Medal and the American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She is a Writer in Residence at Bard College and lives in New York City.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is a National Book Award Finalist and the author of Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize and The Story Prize, and was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Sabrina & Corina was also awarded the 2020 Reading the West Award in Fiction from the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association and has been shortlisted for the 2020 Saroyan International Prize. Fajardo-Anstine is the 2019 recipient of the Denver Mayor’s Award for Global Impact in the Arts. Her fiction and essays have appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, The American Scholar, Boston Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Idaho Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. Kali has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Tin House, and Hedgebrook. She has an MFA from the University of Wyoming and is from Denver, Colorado. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, Japanese, and Italian.
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