Keynote
A collection of fanciful, philosophical science fictions by “one of Mexico’s finest novelists” (Vulture)
Book Title
Ten Planets
Subtitle
Stories
Cover Image
- “This speculative collection draws inspiration from Melville, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick and others to produce contemplative, emotive and richly imagined stories.”—The New York Times Book Review
Body
The characters that populate Yuri Herrera’s surprising new story collection inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions and Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, these very short stories are an inspired extension of this significant writer’s work.
In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meager bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Yuri Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition.
In Ten Planets, Herrera’s consistent themes—the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms—are explored with evident brilliance and delight.
List Price
$15.00
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About the Author
Credit: Tori Bush
Praise
- Shortlisted for the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
A Southwest Review Must-Read Book of 2023 - “[A] highly original set of voyages to imaginary worlds that shed unexpected light on our own.”—Liz Braswell, The Wall Street Journal
- “Reading Ten Planets . . . requires not only suspension of disbelief but surrender of control. Both are challenging; both are worth it. Nobody writes like Yuri Herrera, and it would be a shame not to travel with him as far as his imagination can go.”—Lily Meyer, NPR.org
- “Herrera’s writing moves through different registers with ease, some familiar, some uncanny . . . all of it unlikely and beautiful. In Ten Planets, Herrera shifts from the fantastical (monsters and aliens) to the eerily materialist (a bacterium achieves sentience) like a boy flipping through the pages of a beloved comic book: with delight and conviction.”—Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub
