Description

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From one of Mexico’s most exciting young writers, a cosmopolitan and candid essay collection exploring life in cities across the world and reflecting on the transformative importance of literature in understanding ourselves

In ten intimate essays, Daniel Saldaña París explores the cities he has lived in, each one home to a new iteration of himself. In Mexico City he’s a young poet eager to prove himself. In Montreal—an opioid addict desperate for relief. In Madrid—a lonely student seeking pleasure in grotesque extremes. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise questions: Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth? 

Saldaña París turns to literature and film, poetry and philosophy for answers. The result is a hybrid of memoir and criticism, "a sensory work, full of soundscapes, filth, planes, closed spaces, open vastness" (El País).

About the Author

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DANIEL SADLAÑA PARÍS is a Mexican writer based in New York and Mexico City. He is the author of the novels Among Strange Victims and Ramifications. In 2017, he was included on the prestigious Bogotá39 list.

CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY is an award-winning translator of Latin American literature. She has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, and Jazmina Barrera.

PHILIP K. ZIMMERMAN is a writer and translator from Spanish and German. His work has been presented in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Guernica, Necessary Fiction, the Berlin International Literature Festival, and the New York International Fringe Festival.

Praise For…

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Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Title

"These electric essays linger in the mind." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A collection of ten essays [...]: each of them shot through with humor and forming a kind of Künstlerroman in their totality." —Literary Hub

"Planes Flying Over a Monster is a coming-of-age story written in the same kind of fragments that make up most minds in the 21st century. A lucid book about the surprising drugs to which we become addicted; a book about broken dreams, missed trips, romantic failures—the unwritten books that make up our identities. An unforgettable book for its self-mockery, at turns brutal and endearing." —Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born

"Daniel Saldaña París's Planes Flying Over a Monster is engrossing and wise and surprising; reading it feels like getting caught in an unexpected eight-hour conversation with a fascinating stranger at a dark bar. These are essays about caregiving, desperation, art-making, recklessness and youth, ghost limbs of all kinds; and these are maps of cities: maps of drug dealers and secret meetings, lost poets, lost gardens, long shadows and blood-stained patios. Throughout, I felt utterly surrendered to the sparkling, wry, self-interrogating tenderness of this voice and these fever dreams. I will teach these essays and ponder them and feel grateful for them for the rest of my days." —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams