Restoration - Paperback

by Ave Barrera (Author), Ellen Jones (Translator), Robin Myers (Translator)

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.

Author Biography

Ave Barrera (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1980) is a writer and editor. Her first novel, Puertas demasiado pequeñas (2016) won the Sergio Galindo Award and was published by Charco Press under the title The Forgery (2022). Her second novel, Restoration, won the 2018 Lipp Prize. Ave has also published short stories and essays in anthologies and electronic media. Since 2019 she coordinates the Vindictas Collection for the National University of Mexico. In 2023 she received a grant from the Kislak Foundation for a writing residency at the University of Florida, USA. Her new novel is Notas desde el interior de la ballena (Notes from Inside the Whale ).

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.; The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón; and A Whale is a Country and In Vitro, both by Isabel Zapata. 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 .