Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story "Sugarcane" appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella How to Shake the Other Man was published by Nouvella Books. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, and serves as a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
A New York Times Best Book of 2016
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Extraordinary. . . .
A powerful story. . . . Palacio unspools his characters' lives with
the type of omniscient authority befitting an epic. . . . The
narrative may operate on a grand scale, but Palacio is just as
gifted a miniaturist, able to distill the unbearable ruptures in a
family down to a single image." --Dinaw Mengestu, The New York
Times Book Review "Some books are storms. Others are weather. Derek
Palacio's debut novel, The Mortifications, is very much the latter.
It is hot sun and cool rain, morning fog and the hum of a fan in
the window. It ranges and roams, this book. When it settles onto a
moment, it does so with the weight of ten butterflies." --NPR "The
Mortifications is fascinated with bodies--especially the physical
manifestations of emotions. . . . The novel doesn't seem to want to
sublimate the ugly, the putrid, or the decayed; it's aware that
describing abject bodily realities, in fiction, can in a sense turn
them into obejcts of beauty." --Bookforum "Palacio writes vividly,
conjuring smells and tastes of life both in the frozen north and
the tropical Caribbean, from the sweat of a nun, for whom expensive
soap might prompt 'inclinations toward vanity' to the flavor of
tobacco and tomatoes." --The Boston Globe "A sweeping, lyrical tale
of a family's undoing. . . . Palacio's prose contains moments of
beauty and magic that are a pleasure to the ear." --Dallas Morning
News "A powerful family saga.... Gorgeous and challenging....
Palacio's writing is deceptively simple and startlingly original,
and his characters, raw, almost mythic in scope, hang on long after
the last page. Searching, heartbreaking, and achingly beautiful,
the novel is as intimate as it is sweeping."
--Kirkus, starred review "A revelatory tale of Cuba and America, of
faith and family, of the spirit and the flesh, The Mortifications
is a debut remarkable for its wise and scrupulous insight into the
human heart. Palacio feelingly reminds us that all immigrants are
also exiles, wounded with loss, striving to make a home even as
they yearn for the one they've left behind." --Peter Ho Davies
"Derek Palacio may well be one of the best narrators to come out of
the Americas since Gabriel García Márquez. Like One Hundred Years
of Solitude, The Mortifications is a family saga that combines the
uncanny with astute and accurate depictions of reality." --The
Washington Independent Review of Books "The Mortifications is a
sweeping, moving story of a family in a permanent state of longing.
Shimmering in its immediacy and wisdom, this is a novel about how
the desire for lost home and family can grow wild over a life in
ways that are both beautiful and devastating. Derek Palacio is a
gift of a writer." --Ramona Ausubel "A novel of stunning sweep and
vision. The story of the Encarnación family plunges the reader into
the dislocating heartache of life in exile, in the intermediary
land between the home that has been forsaken and the one that
might, in the future, await. Derek Palacio's prose is so assured
it's hard to believe The Mortifications is his first novel--but it
is, miraculously, and it is one magnificent debut." --Laura van den
Berg "The Mortifications, Derek Palacio's gorgeous debut novel
about Cuba and its people--those who left, those who can never
leave--will tear through your heart, and at the center of this
swirling, magical story are the Encarnacións, a family full of
enough dysfunction, heartache, love, loss, magic, urgent need,
sensuality, and sexuality to make you long for your own family of
heartbreaking and heartbroken misfits." --Manuel Gonzales
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