Thursday, Apr 29, 2010

Location:
Ken Sanders Rare Books

Murder City:

Ciudad Juárez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border city, it now resembles a failed state—in 2008 alone, 1,607 people were murdered. In Murder City, award-winning author Charles Bowden has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city collapses into violence. Interweaving stories of its inhabitants—a raped beauty queen, a repentant hitman, a journalist fleeing for his life—with a broader meditation on the town's descent into anarchy, Bowden reveals how Juárez's culture of violence will not only worsen, but inevitably spread north. Heartbreaking, disturbing and unforgettable, Murder City establishes Bowden as one of our leading writers working at the height of his powers.

Writers who cover the border have stolen from Chuck Bowden for years. They skirt the abyss in their books, but in Murder City Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands. Crawling with ghosts and demons, dripping blood, howling with rage and terror, it's go-for-broke apocalyptic prophecy. Forget Baghdad, forget Kandahar: Hell is only fifty yards away from your back porch, and Chuck Bowden is going to make you look or die trying.
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil's Highway

Dreamland:

What do you call a place where people are tortured and murdered and buried in the backyard of a nice, middle-class condo? Where police work for the drug cartels? Where the meanings of words such as "border" and "crime" and "justice" are emptying out into the streets and flowing down into the sewers? You call it Juárez or, better yet, Dreamland.

Realizing that merely reporting the facts cannot capture the massive disintegration of society that is happening along the border, Charles Bowden and Alice Leora Briggs use nonfiction and sgraffito drawings to depict the surreality that is Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Starting from an incident in which a Mexican informant for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security murdered a man while U.S. agents listened in by cell phone—and did nothing to intervene—Bowden forcefully and poetically describes the breakdown of all order in Juárez as the power of the drug industry outstrips the power of the state. Alice Leora Briggs's drawings—reminiscent of Northern Renaissance engraving and profoundly disquieting—intensify the reality of this place where atrocities happen daily and no one, neither citizens nor governments, openly acknowledges them. With the feel of a graphic novel, the look of an illuminated medieval manuscript, and the harshness of a police blotter, Dreamland captures the routine brutality, resilient courage, and rapacious daily commerce along the U.S.-Mexico border.

 

Charles Bowden has evolved in the past thirty years into one of the most important living writers on these, or any other shores.  Arguably, he is America's most fearless and tireless voice; a voice that has grown stronger with each of his fifteen books: from Killing the Hidden Waters (1977) and Down By The River (2002) to A Shadow in the City (2005) and Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing (2009). Bowden writes about the cracks in the sidewalk, the things that nobody else wants to see. He picks up the pieces of a fragmented and broken republic and confronts us with an Old Testament fury on the errors of our ways.  Bowden's vision is a terrifying one, a relentless look into the future we have already made; an articulation of what has gone wrong, and a plea for sanity before it's too late. Bowden is a contributing editor of Esquire, and writes for other magazines such as Harper’s and The New York Times Book Review, as well as for newspapers. He is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Sidney Hillman Award for journalism. He currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Julián Cardona is a photojournalist based in Ciudad Juárez who has documented the devastating effects of globalization along the U.S.-Mexico border since 1993. Since that time he has amassed thousands of photographs bearing witness to the harsh reality of border life, from the hundreds of unsolved murders of Mexican women in Juárez, to the social effects caused by low wages paid in border factories; from the exodus of Mexican immigrants fleeing their country and its collapsing economy, to the shanty town communities living in slum conditions right next to the wealthiest country in the world.  His photo documentation of the violence, poverty and social upheaval he witnesses tells a story that one hundred years from now will still cause people to feel the wounds of an era. He was the force and imagination behind the original Juárez photographic exhibition that resulted in the photojournalistic book Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, his first collaboration with Charles Bowden. Cardona's work has been exhibited in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. In 2004, he was awarded the prestigious Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Fellowship.

Born in Borger, Texas, Alice Leora Briggs, received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. She has taught painting, drawing, and other media at several universities and art schools throughout the country including The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Iowa, and University of Arizona. Her works have been featured in numerous exhibitions including venues at the Missoula Museum of Arts (Montana), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Salt Lake City Art Center (Utah), Cedar Rapids Art Museum (Iowa), New Mexico State University (Las Cruces), Utah State University (Logan), City Museum of Bratislava (Slovakia), Des Moines Art Center (Iowa) and de Young Museum (San Francisco). Briggs describes sgraffito, the process used for her work in Dreamland, as:

incis[ing] white marks into black surfaces with a knife. Called sgraffito, my drawing method originated in 13th century German wall decoration, and later was used to embellish ceramics in 16th century Italy. This method of humble artistic origin, now helps me cast light across scenes cobbled from myriad circumstances, times and places...My current focus is Ciudad Juarez. In this city one sees fiction in action, even an hour is time enough to blend truth with myth. I have traveled to sites of recent executions, photo-documented known “death houses” where members of the Juarez cartel have tortured, murdered and buried fellow citizens. To the west of Juarez I have visited an asylum for the city’s disinherited. This makeshift desert refuge is the distillate of the city and houses some 115 souls.

I have been to the Juarez morgue, witnessed the autopsy of a young man fresh from his execution, wandered among the unidentified corpses in the freezers, seen the guns and bullets and maggots and broken instruments of torture pulled from shallow graves.