Formats
Anthologies
105
Audio
310
Catalogues
410
Clothing
23
Editions
31
Ephemera
68
Literary
38
Monographs
179
Posters
269
Video
39
Zines
142

Shop > Artists' Books

Out of Stock
#05765

The Sad Passions

Artist
Veronica Gonzalez Peña
Date
2013
Publisher
Semiotext(e)
Format
Artists' Books
ISBN
9781584351207
Size
15.3 × 23 × 2.3 cm
Length
343 
Description

By Veronica Gonzalez Peña

Told by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Pena’s The Sad Passions captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. Set against the backdrop of a colonial past, spanning three generations, and shuttling from Mexico City to Oaxaca to the North Fork of Long Island to Veracruz, The Sad Passions is the lyrical story of a middle-class Mexican family torn apart by the undiagnosed mental illness of Claudia, a lost child of the 1960s and the mother of four little girls.

It is 1960, and the wild and impulsive sixteen-year-old Claudia elopes from her comfortable family home in Mexico City with Miguel, a seductive drifter who will remain her wandering husband for the next twenty years. Hitchhiking across the United States with Miguel, sometimes spending the night in jails, Claudia stops sleeping and begins seeing visions. Abandoned at a small clinic in Texas, she receives electroshock treatment while seven months pregnant with her first daughter. Afterward, Miguel leaves her, dumb and drooling, at her mother’s doorstep.

Living more often at her mother’s home than with Miguel, Claudia will give birth to four girls. But when Julia, her second daughter, is inexplicably given away to a distant relation in Los Angeles, Claudia’s fragile, uncertain state comes to affect everyone around her. Julia’s disappearance—which could symbolize the destabilizing effect of manic depression—will become the organizing myth in all of the daughters’ unsettled lives; for if one can disappear, why not all of them?

Veronica Gonzalez is the coeditor of Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings and the founder of rockypoint Press, a series of artist-writer collaborations produced in association with 1301PE Gallery. twin time, her first novel, won her the 2007 Premio Aztlán Literary Prize.

  1. The Sad Passions
 

Related Items

  1. Schizo-Culture: The Event, The Book - Semiotext(e)
  2. John Kelsey: Drowning Devourers of the Deep Plane
  3. Jennifer Doyle: Campus Security
  4. Jim Fletcher and Harry Mathews: Week One
  5. The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds
  6. Kodwo Eshun: Dan Graham: Rock My Religion
  7. Anna Dezeuze: Thomas Hirschhorn: Deleuze Monument (Hardcover)
  8. Chris Kraus and Eileen Myles: I Love Dick
  9. Holy Shit: Solid Rain
  10. Liz Kotz and Eileen Myles: The New Fuck You
  11. Jean-Max Colard, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Philippe Parreno: COOOOOOOOP FANZINE 2
  12. Claudia Peña Salinas and Denise Schatz: Nur Du!
  13. Mazes
  14. Lines Breaking
  15. It is what it is. Or is it?
  16. Jennifer Allora, Andrea Bowers, Guillermo Calzadilla, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Joan Jonas, Stefan Kaegi, Philippe Rahm, and Lucy Raven: Resource Hungry: Our Cultured Landscape and its Ecological Impact
  17. Neue Slowenische Kunst: NSK from Kapital to Capital
  18. Lars Ahlstrom and Hans Anders Molin: Airspace
  19. David Askevold and Christina Ritchie: Activating the Archive 4: Double Agent
  20. Colin Campbell and Bruce ed. Ferguson: Activating the Archive 2: Otherwise Worldly
  21. Greg Curnoe: Blue Book no. 8