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Margot Glantz

Margo Glantz is a writer, scholar, professor, journalist and world traveler. She has published more than 25 books, and has written for the most important newspapers and magazines in Mexico, Latin America and other countries. Her work has been translated into English, French and Italian and includes Las genealogías, Magda Donato Price, 1982; Síndrome de naufragios, Xavier Villaurrutia Price, 1984; De la amorosa inclinación a enredarse en cabellos; Apariciones; El rastro, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Price, 2003; Historia de una mujer que caminó por la vida con zapatos de diseñador; Saña; Coronada de moscas; and her work in progress, Genes de perro y Abra grande la boquita.

Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and visiting professor at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley, among others. Glantz is also a Guggenheim and Rockefeller scholar, and a member of the Mexican Academy of Letters, and a recipient of the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes, 2004; Premio Coatlicoe, 2009; Premio FIL(antes Rulfo), 2010.

Crown of Flies

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." (Marcel Proust). Crown of Flies is a travel book in this most profound sense. It gives us the opportunity to travel through the ground of the stately, terrible kingdom of the enormous and absurd country that is India. We breathe in the aroma of urine, incense and spice; we see the strident colors of the fabrics; we dodge the frightful rickshaws and motorcyclists in Agra; we see the whiteness of their teeth and the magnificent length of the Indian hair; we attend to cremation, temples and mystic spots like the caves of Ajanta or the Taj Majal; we travel to Benares, Kajuraho, Delhi, Mumbai, Udaipur y Varanasi, among other cities.

Like background music, always present and giving texture and depth to the narrative, is the impressive erudition of Glantz. The reader's perception and experience is fertilized equally by the miles travelled and the artistic encounters absorbed. The books of Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga, J. R. Ackerley, Ananda Coomaraswamy, E. M. Forster, Agatha Christie and, of course, Octavio Paz, feed this travel tale and reinforce the literary experience of life with intimate and evocative memories.

The book includes the extraordinary photographs of Alina López Cámara. The game of mirrors that the images and the text create, enrich the experience of the journey and elevate the ultimate purpose of literature: the free movement of the mind.