One that got away…
The kind of book I’d want to have published.
Mercedes Olivara in the Dallas Morning News on Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa‘s “Texas, The Great Theft” from Deep Vellum Press, which specializes in foreign works in translation:
It may be historical fiction, but many of the events in Carmen Boullosa’s latest book seem as if they just happened yesterday.
Texas, The Great Theft takes us back to 1859, in the years following the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the U.S.-Mexican War. Tensions were high as one culture displaced another. Bandits were commonplace, and so was legal chicanery.
Many Mexican landowners who had been given land grants centuries ago by the Spanish crown lost them in legal schemes or in English-speaking courts where Spanish documents were not recognized. This caused one landowner, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, to fight back as best he could — with his own army.
(more at the Dallas Morning News)
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