Fiction – Cultural Heritage – Political – Hispanic & Latino

RELEASE DATE: 4/8/2025(WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER’S WAREHOUSE)

Originally Published in Hardcover 5/7/2024

Moving between New York City, Mexico City, and Iowa City, a young member of the Mexican elite sees his life splinter in a centuries-spanning debut that blends the Latin American traditions of Roberto Bolao and Fernanda Melchor with the autofiction of US writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole.

Sebastin lived a childhood of privilege in Mexico City. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowas MFA program.

But Sebastins life is shaken by the Trump administrations restrictions on immigrants, his mothers terminal cancer, the cracks in his relationship, and his fathers forced resignation at the hands of Mexicos new president. As he struggles through the Trump and Lpez Obrador years, Sebastin must confront his fathers role in the Mexican drug war and navigate his whiteness in Mexican contexts even as he is often perceived as a person of color in the US. As he does so, the novel moves through centuries of Mexican literary history, from the 17th century letters of a peevishly polymathic Spanish colonizer to the contemporary packaging of Mexican writers for a US audience.

Split between the US and Mexico, this stunning debut explores whiteness, power, immigration, and the history of Mexican literature, to wrestle with the contradictory relationship between two countries bound by geography and torn apart by politics.

AUTHOR BIO:

Nicols Medina Morawas born and raised in Mexico City. He has degrees from Yale University and the writing program of the University of Iowa, and has worked in New York City as a journalist at Reuters and BuzzFeed. His writing has appeared inThe Nation,The New York Times, andn+1, where he won the 2023n+1Writers’ Fellowship. He lives in Mexico City, where he is a writer and editor forRevista Nexos.

Praise forAmrica del Norte

“Nicols Medina Mora is a one-manBoom latinoamericano!”
–Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofThe Netanyahus

“A uniquely twenty-first century voice: Nicols Medina Mora is equally fluent in three literary traditions–Mexican, American, European. The advantages and gifts to literature of this situation are manifold, surprising, and humane. In this novel, he charts a course between history and literature and is borne aloft by these waves–the voice of the NAFTA generation, and much more.”
–Marco Roth, founding co-editor ofn+1and author ofThe Scientists

“Amrica del Norteis for the adventurous. Its tale of a young Mexican man coming of age between Mexico City, New York City, and Iowa City melds genres–including romance, etymological history, migration narrative, geopolitical analysis, and more–without fear, showing us that literature can be so much more than we know. Read this to remember the wonder of learning that ink on the page could mean something and that pages bound between two covers could contain a world.”
–Elias Rodriques, author ofAll the Water I’ve Seen Is Running

“Here’s the thing about Nico Medina Mora’s debut novel: it reads like his tenth. It feels like the kind of casually elegant and elastically curious book that a master storyteller would spend a lifetime working toward. And yet,Amrica del Nortesings to us through both its jubilant imagination and wounded intelligence so that we might all get a glimpse at a brand-new way of writing the world.”
–John D’Agata, author ofAbout a Mountain