Mephisto's Waltz

Nominated for the Northern California Translation in Fiction Book Award

"His literature reflects the droll and ironic constant of his observations... Pitol knew how to see others, and he managed to reconcile and reflect very different worlds." — Elena Poniatowska, author of The Heart of the Artichoke

"Pitol is a writer of another kind: his importance lies on the page, in the creation of his own world, in his ability to shed light on the world." — Daniel Saldaña Paris, author of Among Strange Victims

"Pitol’s short stories, essays and crime novels merge fiction with memoir in an imaginative swirl of contemplation and reflection." —Paulina Villegas, The New York Times

"This collection spans decades in PItol’s career, and the stories found within it are set in numerous countries, giving a fantastic sense of the dizzying life of their author. Pitol’s storytelling often takes storytelling itself as the subject, and the winding and complex tales here fantastically evoke different modes of memory and narrative." — Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

"Known for transcending genres and styles, Pitol’s writing stretched beyond the traditional magical realism of Latin America to include surrealist, irreverent turns that were both dark in their truth and light in their playful structure." — Laura Farmer, The Gazette

“A dizzying and, at times, disorienting read, yet surely this is what caused Pitol to light up an already-lit Latin scene . . . Pitol’s biggest leaps forward—nesting stories inside one another, analyzing his writing like a critic, blurring the line between life and art—test the limits of what bookfolk today like to call autofiction . . . Together, the fragments add up to a broad snapshot of a time and place and, in hindsight, make the narrative gymnastics of Bolaño seem inevitable.”
— Robert Rea, The Southwest Review