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Thirteen Heavens

Thirteen Heavens

By Mark Fishman

"Two friends two friends, how close could they get without being one man ... one in love with a ghost, the other ... longed for the son who'd more than likely already become a ghost." Rubén Arenal, nicknamed Rocket by his close friends and family, and Ernesto Cisneros are longtime friends, as close as brothers, living in Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua. Rubén is a potter who lives alone in his studio apartment. Ernesto is married to Guadalupe and they have one son, Coyuco, who is training to be a teacher. Out of these bald facts spins magic. Rubén falls in love with an eerily lifelike mannequin in a shop window, widely rumored to be more flesh and bone than mere artifice and modelled on a local beauty nicknamed La Pascualita, who died young many decades ago. Rubén trails after her ghost while Ernesto leaves their hometown to go in search of his son, kidnapped and disappeared by the police while out on a student protest with forty-two of his comrades from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College.

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Guernica World Editions (World Prose)

9781771835282

400 pages |

$25.00 CAD
$25.00 CAD
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Reviews

Set in 2014, Thirteen Heavens is a hypnotizing tale of corrupt politics, brutal violence, and all-too-human drama. For all of its quiet brutality, the narrative is infused with an entrancing, dreamlike mix of Mexican folklore, popular song and poetry. At the novel's very heart lies the porosity of the boundary between this life and the next. It is a book like no other and, once begun, it is very hard to put down. Once put down, it is very hard to forget. -- Richard Aronowitz, author of An American Decade and Life Lessons

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About the author

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1954, Mark Fishman has lived and worked in Paris since 1995. His short stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines such as the Chicago Review, the Carolina Quarterly, the Black Warrior Review, the Mississippi Review, Frank (Paris), and The Literary Review. He was the English-language editor of The Purple Journal (Paris) and Les Cahiers Purple (Lisbon).