The Story of My Teeth

Description

Gustavo 'Highway' Sanchez is a man with a mission: he is planning to replace every last one of his unsightly teeth. He has a few skills that might help him on his way: he can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums, he can interpret Chinese fortune cookies, he can stand an egg upright on a table, and he can float on his back. And, of course, he is the world's best auction caller - although other people might not realise this, because he is, by nature, very discreet. Studying auctioneering under Grandmaster Oklahoma and the famous country singer Leroy Van Dyke, Highway travels the world, amassing his collection of 'Collectibles' and perfecting his own specialty: the allegoric auction. In his quest for a perfect set of pearly whites, he finds unusual ways to raise the funds, culminating in the sale of the jewels of his collection: the teeth of the 'notorious infamous' - Plato, Petrarch, Chesterton, Virginia Woolf et al. Written with elegance, wit and exhilarating boldness, Valeria Luiselli takes us on an idiosyncratic and hugely enjoyable journey that offers an insightful meditation on value, worth and creation, and the points at which they overlap.

VALERIA LUISELLI was born in Mexico City in 1983 and is currently studying for a PhD at Columbia University. Her work has been published in the New York Times, McSweeney's and Dazed Confused, and has been translated into many languages. Her debut novel was Faces in the Crowd and she is also the author of a collection of essays, Sidewalks.

[Luiselli is a] gifted young Mexican writer... [The Story of My Teeth] is like a papier-mache figurine: the story of a life told as an assemblage of quotation, anecdotes, famous names and auctioneer's lots. It's a clever trick - producing both a slim magical realist 'essay-novel' and simultaneously a dense, allegorical art object... The effect is quite moving -- Philip Maughan * Literary Review * A combination of memoir, fiction, art criticism and autobiographical reflection, this is a remarkable story about stories... The Story of My Teeth is a testament to eccentricity. If eccentricity is deviation from a known curve, then Luiselli has created an exceptional 'novel-essay' that irradiates beyond the orthodoxies of literary genre -- Natalie Ferris * Frieze * Postmodernism has barely begun to look retro and here it is again, subtly restyled in [The Story of My Teeth]... The prose is confident, playful, learned; and it is translated into utterly convincing English via Luiselli's collaboration with Christina MacSweeney -- Claire Lowden * TLS * This playful collaborative novel invites reader participation -- Books of the Year 2015 * New York Times * Forms and genres collide in this often hilarious experimental fiction from one of our most consistent young writers. It tells the story of an auctioneer and his collection of teeth, but it doubles as a kind of labor theory of art and writing -- 50 Best Independent Press books of 2015 * Flavorwire * [A] delightfully unclassifiable novel... There is an insatiable hunger for storytelling in these pages... it's difficult not to follow wherever it takes you * Publishers Weekly * [The Story of My Teeth] blur[s] the line between the real and the imagined. Sanchez's voice is an engaging one... [full of] Luiselli's wit -- Paul Gould * Financial Times * Noticeable is the formal experimentation - the blending and splicing of genres - in the part-essay, part-fictive writings of Luiselli -- Arifa Akbar (editorial mention) * Independent * The playfully brilliant The Story of My Teeth follows an auctioneer as he collects both stories and strange items (including what he claims are the teeth of Virginia Woolf). The story behind the book is also fascinating - Luiselli wrote it in collaboration with workers at the Jumex juice factory in Mexico -- Books We Loved in 2015 * Buzzfeed * An unusual and engaging creation with [a] light touch * Irish Times * Valeria Luiselli's delirious The Story of My Teeth is just about as brilliant and bonkers as it sounds... There's a giddy joy in the book with sheer audacity on the part of the author. None of this should work, you keep thinking, but it does. It really does. There's such charm in the writing, and such wonderful strangeness in the narrative, that you can't help but fall in love with every page of the book... This is one of those rare books. It should not work at all, but it might just wind up being one of the most essential novels of the year -- Daniel Carpenter * Bookmunch * This delightfully quirky little book has just won the LA Times Best Book Award in the Fiction category, an accolade it richly deserves... The story behind this book is as enchanting and original as that within its covers. It is the result of Valeria Luiselli and the workers in Jumex... Many cameos pop up, figures from ancient Greece up to the present day, and the lines between the real and imaginary are, at times, hardly discernible... Fans of Borges and Marquez will be enthralled. It is magical surrealism brought to an entirely different, accessible, space -- Anne Cunningham * Sunday Independent (Dublin) * Interesting and singular; it bristles with references to philosophy and literature, from Tacitus to Baudrillard via Montaigne and GK Chesterton. It is quirky, funny even, and highly structured -- Jane Housham * Guardian *