Fury: A Novel

(Paperback)

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In this debut novel, Clyo Mendoza, a young, award-winning Mexican poet and novelist, weaves together multiple narratives into a lyrical, shape-shifting existential reflection on love, violence, and the power of myth. "Fury has the poetic and wild force of the desert. In its pages there is tenderness, fear and forceful, rhythmic writing with images that are difficult to forget. It is about the violence of desire that turns us into dogs that drool, howl and bite, but also about love in the midst of hostility and helplessness. This is why it is a disturbing and, at the same time, deeply moving novel." -M nica Ojeda In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lazaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and hallucinating from heat and thirst, mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men-and of their mothers, lovers and companions-Mendoza explores her characters' passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them. After winning the International Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness, incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters' destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry. Readers will be blown away by the sensitivity of the writing, and will shudder at the way violence conveyed with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition. "An amazing, hypnotic and beautiful novel, like contemplating the desert." -Juan Pablo Villalobos

Reviews

I loved the churning gyre ofFury, an enigmatic and audacious novel that proves the truest stories aren't told, they're repeated. Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

Fury has the poetic and savage force of the desert. Its pages are full of tenderness, fear, and a persuasive, rhythmic prose withunforgettableimages. It deals with the violence of desire that turns us into drooling, howling dogs that bite, but also with love amidst hostility and neglect. That makes it an unsettling and, at the same time, profoundly moving novel. Mnica Ojeda, author of Jawbone

By tracing the genealogical tree that intertwines the fates of Juan and Lzaro, eternal soldiers in a phantasmagoric limbo of the Mexican Revolution, and a handful of women, whose bodies and loves mutate though they remainas powerful as vengeance, Clyo Mendoza introduces us to dozens of stories of sex, hatred, abandonment, and magic, narrated and deformed by the potent oral traditions that influence the language she conjures to render the ghosts real; it is the hallucinatory and brutal language of the desert. Dolores Reyes, author of Eartheater

An astonishing, hypnotic, and beautiful novel, like contemplating the desert. Juan Pablo Villalobos, author of Invasion of the Spirit People

There is something timeless about Clyo Mendozas Fury. It has the music of Scheherazades stories, and it tells of an ageless desert and anageless violence that gives birth to itself with every new generation. It touched upon an open wound in Mexico, and Im sure that readers everywhere will be enthralled by its power. Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra and On Lighthouses


I kept thinking of Kathy Acker as I read Clyo Mendoza's brilliantfever dream of a novel, Fury, but also of Juan Rulfo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. It's weird, gorgeous, shocking and gentle, more or less all at once, and Christina Macsweeney'stranslation brings it burning across into English with tremendous aplomb. Laird Hunt, author of Lorrie

Author Bio

Clyo Mendoza (Oaxaca, Mexico, 1993) is a poet and novelist. She is the author of the poetry collections Anamnesis (2016) and Silencio (2018), which was awarded the Premio Internacional de Poesia Sor Juan Ines de la Cruz, and the novel Furia (2021), which was awarded the Premio Javier Morote by the Confederaci n Espanola de Gremios y Asociaciones de Libreros and the Amazon Premio Primera Novela. She has contributed to numerous poetry anthologies, including Poetas parricidas (Cuadrivio, 2014), Los reyes Subterraneos- Veinte poetas j venes de Mexico (La Bella Varsovia, 2015), and Liberoamericanas- 80 poetas contemporaneas(Liberoamerica, 2018). Mendoza is the recipient of scholarships from the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes and the Fundaci n Antonio Gala, in C rdoba, Spain. She has also collaborated on various transdisciplinary projects and experiments with painting, photography, and sound collage. Christina MacSweeney has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. Her work has been recognized in a number of important awards. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclan Translation Prize and also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (2017). Her most recent translations include fiction and nonfiction works by Daniel Saldana Paris, Elvira Navarro, Ver nica Gerber Bicecci, Julian Herbert, Karla Suarez, and Jazmina Barrera, whose autobiographical text, Linea Nigra, is, at the time of writing, a double finalist in the NBCC awards (translation and autobiography). She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published translations, articles, and interviews on a variety of platforms.