Restoration

Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Dávila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong.Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room - scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks - the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room?Restoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what’s behind our own barred door.

Ave Barrera (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1980) holds a BA in Hispanic Literature from the University of Guadalajara, and for several years worked as an editor in Oaxaca. Ave has been awarded fellowships from the Fundación Carolina to study publishing at the Complutense University of Madrid and the Young Creators Grant for Novel (2010 and 2014) from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA). She has worked as a copywriter for e-media and as a ghostwriter. She also writes short stories and published an illustrated children’s book, Una noche en el laberinto (A Night in the Labyrinth, 2014). She was recipient of the Sergio Galindo Award from the Veracruz University with her first novel Puertas demasiado pequeñas (The Forgery). She currently lives in Mexico City and is writing a new novel, Tratado de la vida marina (A Treatise of Marine Life) with support from FONCA. Her latest novel was published in 2019 in Mexico and Spain under the title Restauración (Restoration).

Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish. Her recent translations include Beyond Mestizaje: Contemporary Debates on Race in Mexico edited by Tania Islas Weinstein and Milena Ang (2024), Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez (2023) and The Remains by Margo Glantz (shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023). Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022). Her short fiction has appeared in LitroMagazine, Slug and The London Magazine .

Robin Myers is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M. (Copper Canyon Press); The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón (Archipelago Books); A Whale Is a Country (Fonograf Editions) and In Vitro (Coffee House Press), both by Isabel Zapata; Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books); and many other works of poetry and prose from across Latin America. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Yale Review, The Drift, Poetry London, and elsewhere; her essays, in Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and Latin American Literature Today .