Death Takes Me

Reviews

Praise for Death Takes Me

“[A] deeply rewarding experience . . . dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . Rivera Garza does not follow the conventions of the mystery narrative, the narrowing of a multitude of names to one. Instead, the novel [grows] increasingly expansive as the strictures around identity grow looser and looser, encompassing more and more. In this harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece, Rivera Garza ultimately goes one step further, unsettlingly implicating readers themselves.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times

“Death Takes Me puts a subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story.”—Time, “Most Anticipated Books of 2025”

“Cristina Rivera Garza’s writing rewires your brain, summoning the ghosts of vivid emotions you’d forgotten you could even feel.”—Esquire

“A brilliant and bewildering novel about murder, castration, and the illegibility of poetry . . . underscores the Mexican novelist’s intellectual depth as well as her formal playfulness, and confronts the way an environment rife with violence can shock citizens into numbness . . . It may well be that the novel’s most important contribution to our moment is that it consciously rejects the language of witnessing, elegy, and moral certainty on display in many contemporary stories about trauma. Death Takes Me, instead, suggests that personal grief and political anger can find expression, too, through ambiguity and irony—and even laughter.”—Nicolás Medina Mora, The Atlantic

“[An] unforgettable literary puzzle . . . seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza’s incisive and poetic style. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Rivera Garza's nonlinear novel of violence and literature, written in elegiac, incandescent prose, reverses the horror of the victims of femicide along the U.S.-Mexico border with taunting murders of men in the city, a pointed turnabout.”—Booklist


Praise for Cristina Rivera Garza

“Cristina Rivera Garza is a writer of startling luminosity.”—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

“One of the most fiercely original literary voices from Latin America.”—Ignacio M. Saìnchez Prado, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer yet to be fully accounted for in English. She is an insubordinate stylist, a skilled creator of atmospheric and haunting language.”—Lina Meruane, author of Seeing Red

“To read Rivera Garza’s work is to experience a visceral relationship with the written word.”—Sightlines

“Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.”—Yuri Herrera, author of Kingdom Cons Expand reviews