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Valeria Luiselli

Tell Me How It Ends

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American Book Award Winner: A “moving, intimate” account of serving as a translator for undocumented children facing deportation (The New York Times Book Review).
Nonfiction Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Structured around the forty questions volunteer worker Valeria Luiselli translates from a court system form and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—here and back home.
“Luiselli’s prose is always lush and astute, but this long essay, which borrows its framework from questions on the cold, bureaucratic work sheets with which she became so familiar (for example, ‘Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared or hurt you?’), is teeming with urgency…In this slim volume about the spectacular failure of the American Dream, she tells the stories of the unnamed children she’s encountered and their fears and desires, as well as her own family’s immigration story.” —Vulture
“Worthy of inclusion in a great American (and international) canon of writing about migration.” –Texas Observer
“A powerful indictment of American immigration policy, [Tell Me How It Ends] examines a system that has failed child refugees in particular.” —Financial Times
“Masterfully blends journalism, auto/biography, and political history into a compelling and cohesive narrative. … Luiselli uses the personal to get political but smartly sidesteps identity politics to focus on policy instead.”—The Rumpus
This book is currently unavailable
109 printed pages
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2017
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  • ruth Contrerasshared an impression4 years ago
    👍Worth reading

  • Fer Silvashared an impression7 years ago
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🎯Worthwhile

Quotes

  • luis alberto aguirre reynahas quoted7 years ago
    The children who cross Mexico and arrive at the U.S. border are not “​​​​​​immigrants,”​​​​​​ not “​​​​​​illegals,”​​​​​​ not merely “​​​​​​undocumented minors.”​​​​​​ Those children are refugees of a war, and, as such, they should all have the right to asylum. But not all of them have it.
  • Sandra Viviana Chisaca Leivahas quoted3 years ago
    There are things that can only be understood retrospectively, when many years have passed and the story has ended. In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it
    develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds.
  • Sandra Viviana Chisaca Leivahas quoted3 years ago
    Hundreds of thousands of kids have made the journey, tens of thousands have made it to the border, thousands to cities like Hempstead. Why did you come to the United States? we ask. They might ask a similar question: Why did we risk our lives to come to this country? Why did they come when, as if in some circular nightmare, they arrive at new schools, in their new neighborhoods, and find there the very things they were running from?

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