Yxta Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, social practice artist, and law professor. The author of ten books, her most recent are the story collection, The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (University of Nevada Press, 2020), and the novels Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Press, 2021) and God Went Like That (Northwestern 2023). Her next work of nonfiction, Artivism and the Law, is in progress and will be published by Cornell University Press in 2024. A History of Hazardous Objects will be published that same year by U Nevada Press. She has won an Art Writer’s Grant, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation/Money For Women, and was a 2021 New York City Arts Corps Grants co-grantee. She’s also been named a fellow at the Huntington Library for her work on radionuclide contamination in Simi Valley, California.
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LocasA Novel
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Locas :A Novel -
LocasA Novel
In this town a woman doesn’t have a hundred choices. Can’t make yourself into a man, right? Can’t even pick up and cruise on out of here just because you get some itch. And even though people talk all about doing college, that’s just some dream they got from watching too much afternoon TV. No. A woman’s got her place if she’s a mama. That makes her a real person, where before she was just some skinny or fat little girl with skin like brown dirt, not worth a dime, not anybody to tip your hat to. But even if the government checks start coming in because you had little José or little Blanca, having a baby’s no free ride.
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Locas :A Novel -
LocasA Novel
Everybody’s thinking, Where’s the blade, man? Who gets it? But you can’t tell. They’re just pounding on each other’s heads with fists, rolling and making grunts, and I wanted to know who the patrón was so bad that I had to close my eyes for a minute and just listen to them fighting, sounded the same as when a butcher breaks up his meat. But when they don’t stop, when one boy don’t bend over dead right away, we knew. Manny dropped the knife.
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Locas :A Novel
“In What It Takes to Get to Vegas the contrapuntal viewpoints—defiant and self-doubting, calculating and fuzzy-headed—are combined into a single stream of consciousness. Frenetic, bittersweet, and often hilarious, Rita’s voice is at once specifically American in its rhythms and syntax, and indisputably female . . . Rita Zapata is who Holden Caulfield would want to be if he were alive in 1999.” —The Boston Globe
“Murray is a stunningly original prose stylist capable of fashioning exhilarating twirls and dips of dialogue . . . The rhythms are so sweet and seductive that you’re tempted to drive to the nearest poetry venue and recite aloud from any page and blow the audience away . . . Passionate, poetic, and, in so many ways, dazzling.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review [on Locas]
“A breath-stopping, muscle-straining journey through the jungles of Central America . . . Murray is quickly becoming to the action/adventure genre what Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin are to science fiction.” —El Paso Times [on The Queen Jade]
Selected Works
- Print Books
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- Cornell University Press
- Print Books
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- University of Nevada Press
- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
- Bookshop
- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
- Bookshop