“Lovely and mysterious.”

“An extraordinary new literary talent.”

“Luiselli’s novel stands apart from most Latin American fiction. She
avoids worn-out narratives about drug wars and violence, and her
downbeat supernaturalism feels quite different from the magical realism
of Gabriel García Márquez. Concerned, above all, with literature’s
ability to transcend time and space, Faces in the Crowd signals the appearance of an exciting female voice to join a new wave of Latino writers.”

“Valeria Luiselli’s Faces
in the Crowd is like nothing I’ve read in a while…Its musings on obsession
and ambition are haunting, and its sense of place is fantastic.”

“Luiselli’s haunting debut novel…erodes the concrete borders
of everyday life with a beautiful, melancholy contemplation of disappearance…Luiselli
plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition.”

“Reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño and
André Gide, Luiselli navigates a dynamic, ghostly world between worlds,
crisscrossing fact and fiction. Few books are as sure to baffle,
surprise, and reward readers as the strange, shifty experiment that is
Luiselli’s fiction debut.”

“In part a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this
deceptively modest-seeming, astonishingly inventive novel creates an
extraordinary intimacy, a sensibility so alive it quietly takes over all your
senses, quivering through your nerve endings, opening your eyes and heart.
Youth, from unruly student years to early motherhood and a loving marriage—and
then, in the book’s second half, wilder and something else altogether, the
fearless, half-mad imagination of youth, I might as well call it—has rarely
been so freshly, charmingly, and unforgettably portrayed. Valeria Luiselli is a
masterful, entirely original writer.”