Cross-Stitch

“Never has a novel about friendship rung truer to me than this one. This is literary art at its most insightful, most tender, most wise. Cross Stitch is a soft-spoken, hyper-articulate masterpiece. ” —John Wray, author of Gone to the Wolves

“Even when Jazmina Barrera is in the business of writing novels, she can't escape the essay form. I carried Cross-Stitch with me to the Olympic Peninsula, up mountains, across miles-long sand spits and, yes, to a lighthouse (in honor of one of Barrera's early preoccupations). Barrera's Ferrante-esque novel of friendship, woven within a cultural history of sewing, makes for an engrossing story, the kind that has you drawing exclamation points in the margins with abundance. I'm amazed, silenced, by the breadth of Barrera's thinking, her manifold interests. Christina MacSweeney, returning for a third time to render Barrera's work into English, is the only translator I want to see at the helm.” —Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books

Praise for Jazmina Barrera

“Linea Nigra is a beautiful and lucid essay about the journey across motherhood seasons – pregnancy, childbirth and first months of parenting. Far from mythologizing motherhood as an idealized state, Linea Nigra sheds light on the complex and contradictory nature of gestation: a state crossed by terrors, but also by hopes and love; a biological and spiritual mystery that concerns all human beings, as individuals and as a society.” —Fernanda Melchor, The Guardian, on Linea Nigra

“A strange, slim, hybrid book…disarmingly fresh and provocative.…[Barrera’s] is a vision of art as feminine, never truly original or new, but a cycle: art as birth and death; bodies decomposing in the dirt, the roots ‘the tree of our flesh.’” —Christine Henneberg, New York Review of Books, on Linea Nigra

“Clear-eyed and poetic…[A] generous, openhearted project inviting readers to discover what is often hidden away, unseen.” —Los Angeles Review of Books on Linea Nigra

“Eminently worthy of acclaim.” —Vogue (The Best Books of 2022 So Far) on Linea Nigra

“Lighthouses, the ‘frontier between civilization and nature,’ are places of solitude. But they are also signals of shore and home. This book is a light at the end of the tunnel, showing us places we’ll see and things we’ll do when we can go out again.” —The Paris Review on On Lighthouses

“Precise and erudite, Barrera’s writing is as alluring and arresting as the landscapes and stories it conveys. Each piece is crafted with care, imbued with Barrera’s poignant critical sense and her perspicacious ability to unravel the different levels of affect, historicity, and magnificence that constitute the everyday life of each lighthouse.” —Ignacio M. Sánchez, Los Angeles Review of Books on On Lighthouses

“A slim, idiosyncratic history of these structures and their appearances in literature—from Robert Louis Stevenson, whose father and grandfather engineered them, to Virginia Woolf, to Ray Bradbury—the book allows the reader flashes of Barrera’s emotional life amid the accumulated detail.” —Harper’s on On Lighthouses