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Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire

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UPC: 9781911508786
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Authors: Yuri Herrera
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  • Paperback: 120 pages
  • Publisher: And Other Stories (June 16, 2020)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1911508784
  • ISBN-13: 978-1911508786
  • Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.4 x 7.7 inches

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis―the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company―may have committed murder.

The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than ten” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors.

A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers’ tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.

Review

“A searing, painful, poetic, simple, extraordinary book about a 1920 mine disaster.” ―Philippe Sands

"A precise and devastating account that peers into the dark mouths of the El Bordo mine as if they were the gates of hell. In these pages, Yuri Herrera paints a portrait of poverty and neglect and reveals, once again, the way exploitation and abuse lurk at the source of all violence." ―Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of The Remainder

"A Silent Fury is a narrative rebellion against the archive of atrocity. Herrera subverts the archive, turns it against itself, upends its silencing mission and reveals within it the traces of corporate and governmental abuse, disregard and murder."―John Gibler, author of I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us

“Like Life of a Klansman, Herrera’s book is a microhistory inspired by an absence in the archives. But where Ball enriches the record with context and speculation, Herrera conducts a crisp, matter-of-fact investigation. In quietly seething prose―ably translated by Lisa Dillman―he parses the evasive accounts of contemporary journalists, judges, mine administrators, and civil authorities, noting the implications of each elision and discrepancy. By the end, the “accident” looks more like homicide, a crime quickly covered up by local officials and company bureaucrats who barely saw their workers as human . . . The book is a gripping demonstration of how much can be unearthed from the omissions of official accounts.” ―Julian Lucas, Harper's Magazine

"By bringing moral exactitude to a story long silenced for American profit, A Silent Fury joins that most vital of canons, the literatures of witness. Reading against the grain of official documents, defining what is there by what is not, Herrera bears witness to a crime that preceded his birth by 50 years." -Kristen Millares Young, Washington Post

“Herrera knows how to plot an intense plot and handle an original style, as capable of revealing a miserable and anguished social reality as well as elevating with poetry the humble and everyday life in order to reach symbolic proportions.” ⁠―Arturo García Ramos, ABC

“What Yuri Herrera does is Literature, beyond genres or labels. He amply proves it again now, after five years of silence, with a fascinating story that reads like a novel.” ⁠―Matías Néspolo, El Mundo

“With his characteristic sharp prose and exciting rhythm, Herrera is one of the most remarkable writers of Latin America. The El Bordo Mine Fire is an impeccable exercise of journalism.” ⁠―Jaime G. Mora, ABC Cultural

About the Author

Yuri Herrera studied Politics in Mexico, Creative Writing in El Paso and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award after publishing to great critical acclaim in 2015, when it featured on many Best-of-Year lists, including The Guardian’s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books. His second novel The Transmigration of Bodies (2016 in English) and Kingdom Cons (2017 in English) were also published to acclaim, including the Dublin Literary Award (former Impac prize) shortlisting of The Transmigration of Bodies. He currently teaches at the University of Tulane, in New Orleans. The El Bordo Mine Fire is his fourth book, and his first of non-fiction.

Lisa Dillman has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Some of her recent translations include Rain Over MadridSuch Small Hands and The Right Intention by Andrés Barba and Yuri Herrera’s three novels. She won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. She teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.