Yuri Herrera Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Yuri Herrera is an award-winning and critically acclaimed science fiction and horror author from Mexico. He is best known for his work “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” which he published in 2015.
The work would become so popular that it was on the list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by the Guardian and was the winner of the Best Translated Book Award in 2016.

But this was not his first rodeo as Yuri had made his fiction writing debut with the publishing of “Kingdom Cons” in 2012. In addition to his fiction works, he is also the author of the nonfiction work “A Silent Fury” that he published in 2015.
Herrera happens to be the first author writing in Spanish to win the Best Translated Book Award for her novel telling the story of a young woman who crossed the border of the United States from Mexico.

In winning the award for her novel “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” she saw off some big stars. Some of the people she beat to win include Clarice Lispector the Brazilian short story author and Elena Ferrante the bestselling Italian author.

The author Yuri Herrera was quite a huge reader even as a kid and read all the usual children’s fiction works. He began writing when he was still a kid and as soon as he started he was hooked.

Nonetheless, he never called himself an author and still feels it is weird to give himself the title. The moment his desire for writing and his identity came together was when he went to secondary school.

In school, the girls were sent to a typing class and boys had to attend the technical drawing class. It was on that very first day that his teachers learned that he could never draw a straight line and sent him to the typing class.
Surrounded by typewriters and girls, his typing and hormonal learning began to happen simultaneously.

During all this time he was still a very voracious reader and by the time he was in high school, he was reading the likes of Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammet, Walter Mosley, and Raymond Chandler.
He particularly loved these novels as they provided a brutal and honest look into reality.

Yuri Herrera also used to read a lot of poetry from the 1930s and 1940s, particularly from the likes of Xavier Villaurrutia and Jose Gorostiza that were members of the Los Contemporaneos group.

After high school, Yuri Herrera went to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) where he graduated with a degree in political science.

While he majored in political science, he knew that he was destined for a life as an author as he had already published several short stories and even had a column in Pachuca.
He joined the political science department at UNAM at a time when the world was undergoing some major political changes.

There was a mixture of different kinds of activism, hope, and anger as Salinas de Gortari rose to power, the Sandinistas were defeated and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
All these happenings meant that he had an opportunity to read things he maybe would have never read.

During this time, he also used to work as a professor of social theory teaching assistant and was often called upon to fill in for the professor that loved to skip classes.
Ultimately, he would get his bachelor’s degree, a creative writing master’s from the University of Texas El Paso, and a Hispanic Literature doctorate degree from the University of California Berkeley.
As one of the most renowned authors in modern Mexican literature, he now teaches creative writing at the New Orleans-based Tulane University.

Yuri Herrera’s “Signs Preceding the End of the World” is a work that follows Makina, a woman who is crossing the Mexican border into the United States.

Her mother has tasked her with delivering an envelope to her brother who left home for the United States a few years earlier and much of his correspondence since has been erratic cryptic messages here and there.
At the opening of the novel, a dog, a man, and a car are swallowed by a sinkhole in an area overmined for silver. The author presents Makina’s journey in a fable-like manner as she initially connects with three master traffickers who will take her there.
As part of the payment for being taken across, she is also to transport an additional package. She manages to make it to the United States despite the many vigilant border patrols and dangerous criminals all over the route.

However, it is the imagery in turn nightmarish and moving which makes this a very memorable narrative. At some point, she finds a place so desolate and alien, as it is full of excavators, making it look like a dystopian scene in a science fiction novel.
It is a haunting novel that provides an arresting even if strange experience.

“Kingdom Cons” by Yuri Herrera is a powerful novel with violence and art at its core. It follows the members of a drug trafficking ring who do their business and live in a fictional territory that has aspects very familiar with northern Mexico.
Lobo is a young man who had been abandoned by his parents which resulted in him becoming a street performer. It was while he was singing at a cantina that he impressed King, a local narcotics boss.
It is from then on that he gets into a life of excess and danger that he never thought he would ever have.

He became part of the narco boss’s court and is fondly known as the Artist as he pens and performs songs about the man’s conquests and accomplishments similar to a medieval courtier.
Lobo does this even as he pursues romance with a young woman that is the daughter of one of his closest friends.

The many happenings at court will help Lobo learn about loyalty, love, and how to deal with complex power structures without losing his identity.

Yuri Herrera’s novel “The Transmigration of Bodies” is an amusing even if slim book. Following the ravages of a plague that made a city into a desolate ruin, things were looking fire.

However, the Redeemer will not stop from trying to broker peace between two leading families who are on a knife edge as they could just get into a nasty fight over their children.

After he spent the night at the home of Three TimeBlonde his neighbor, the Redeemer receives a call from a woman who says that the rival Castro family has taken Romeo Fonseca their son hostage.
Working with the Unruly, who is Fonseca’s daughter and Neyanderthal his pal, the Redeemer learns that the Fonsecas have taken Castro’s daughter Baby Girl who might have been infected with the plague.
With the tension rising, The Redeemer works hard to try to convince the families to resolve their issues without violence.

In the work, Herrera strips the classic work Romeo and Juliet and combines it with the plague making for an interesting work of fiction.