Event Highlights: Earthly Days Book Presentation
This virtual book presentation, celebrating the publication of the first ever English translation of Los días terrenales (Mexico, 1949), a novel by José Revueltas, took place on Friday, February 19, 2021. Translator Matthew Gleeson and publisher Pedro Jiménez were joined by writer Pedro Ángel Palou in a conversation moderated by David H. Colmenares, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Colonial Latin American Studies at Boston University.
Mexican author Revueltas was a lifelong militant whose political activities stretched from the 1930s Communist Party to the 1968 student movement—and sent him to prison several times. His important writing career included prize-winning novels that lay bare the underbelly of Mexican society, as well as screenplays for noir films during Mexican cinema’s Golden Age. But most of his dark and complex work still remains neglected in English.
Earthly Days, originally published in 1949, is a quintessential Revueltas novel that marries Communist struggle, noir narrative, and psychological depth exploration. It also turned out to be his most controversial: it was withdrawn from circulation when Mexican Marxist circles attacked it as politically heretical, and this is its first appearance in English.