{"product_id":"lost-children-archive-isbn-9780525436461","title":"Lost Children Archive","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES\u003c\/i\u003e 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR \u003cb\u003e•\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e “An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood ... This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eIn Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning \u003ci\u003eTell Me How It Ends\u003c\/i\u003e, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, \u003ci\u003eLost Children Archive\u003c\/i\u003e is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST • TIME MAGAZINE • NPR • CHICAGO TRIBUNE • GQ • O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE • THE GUARDIAN • VANITY FAIR \u003cb\u003e•\u003c\/b\u003e THE ATLANTIC \u003cb\u003e• THE WEEK \u003cb\u003e•\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eTHE DALLAS MORNING NEWS • LIT HUB • KIRKUS REVIEWS • THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY • BOSTON.COM • PUREWOW\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION\u003cbr\u003eWINNER OF THE FOLIO PRIZE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD \u003cbr\u003eFINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION\u003cbr\u003eLONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE\u003cbr\u003eLONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Impossibly smart, full of beauty, heart and insight. Everyone should read this book.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Tommy Orange, author of \u003ci\u003eThere There\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A Great American Novel for our time.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eVanity Fair\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Unforgettable, down to its explosive final sentence. . . . [Luiselli] audaciously stretches the bounds of storytelling.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Virtuosic. . . . The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity. It humanizes us.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “This is a novel that challenges us, as a nation, to reconcile our differences. . . . [The] writing shimmers like its desert setting.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Electric, elastic, alluring, new.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  “A remarkable feat of empathy.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—NPR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “[A] brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising book.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “[Luiselli’s] language is so transporting, it stops you time and again.”  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “Like all great novels. . . . \u003ci\u003eLost Children Archive\u003c\/i\u003e is unquestionably timely, [but] it also approaches a certain timelessness.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Stunning. . . . Uniquely rewarding—and even life-changing.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Delicate, funny, effortlessly poetic.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Passionate.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Rollicking. . . A highly imaginative and politically deft portrait of childhood within a vast American landscape.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eHarper’s Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eValeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection \u003ci\u003eSidewalks\u003c\/i\u003e; the novels \u003ci\u003eFaces in the Crowd\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Story of My Teeth\u003c\/i\u003e; and, most recently, \u003ci\u003eTell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant”; the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award; and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award twice and the Kirkus Prize on three occasions. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGranta\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eMcSweeney’s\u003c\/i\u003e, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in New York City.\u003cb\u003ePart I\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFamily Soundscape\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eRelocations\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn archive presupposes an archivist, a hand that collects and classifies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—Arlette Farge\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo leave is to die a little.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo arrive is never to arrive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—Migrant prayer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eDeparture\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMouths open to the sun, they sleep. Boy and girl, foreheads pearled with sweat, cheeks red and streaked white with dry spit. They occupy the entire space in the back of the car, spread out, limbs offering, heavy and placid. From the copilot seat, I glance back to check on them every so often, then turn around again to study the map. We advance in the slow lava of traffic toward the city limits, across the GW Bridge, and merge onto the interstate. An airplane passes above us and leaves a straight long scar on the palate of the cloudless sky. Behind the wheel, my husband adjusts his hat, dries his forehead with the back of his hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFamily Lexicon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don’t know what my husband and I will say to each of our children one day. I’m not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to pluck and edit out for them, and which ones we’ll shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version—even though plucking, shuffling, and editing sounds is probably the best summary of what my husband and I do for a living. But the children will ask, because ask is what children do. And we’ll need to tell them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe boy turned ten yesterday, just one day before we left New York. We got him good presents. He had specifically said:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo toys.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe girl is five, and for some weeks has been asking, insistently:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen do I turn six?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo matter our answer, she’ll find it unsatisfactory. So we usually say something ambiguous, like:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSoon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a few months.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore you know it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe girl is my daughter and the boy is my husband’s son. I’m a biological mother to one, a stepmother to the other, and a de facto mother in general to both of them. My husband is a father and a stepfather, to each one respectively, but also just a father. The girl and boy are therefore: step-sister, son, stepdaughter, daughter, step-brother, sister, stepson, brother. And because hyphenations and petty nuances complicate the sentences of everyday grammar—the us, the them, the our, the your—as soon as we started living together, when the boy was almost six and the girl still a toddler, we adopted the much simpler possessive adjective our to refer to them two. They became: our children. And sometimes: the boy, the girl. Quickly, the two of them learned the rules of our private grammar, and adopted the generic nouns Mama and Papa, or sometimes simply Ma and Pa. And until now at least, our family lexicon defined the scope and limits of our shared world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFamily Plot\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy husband and I met four years ago, recording a soundscape of New York City. We were part of a large team of people working for the New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. The soundscape was meant to sample and collect all the keynotes and the soundmarks that were emblematic of the city: subway cars screeching to a halt, music in the long underground hallways of Forty-Second Street, ministers preaching in Harlem, bells, rumors and murmurs inside the Wall Street stock exchange. But it also attempted to survey and classify all the other sounds that the city produced and that usually went by, as noise, unnoticed: cash registers opening and closing in delis, a script being rehearsed in an empty Broadway theater, underwater currents in the Hudson, Canada geese flocking and shitting over Van Cortlandt Park, swings swinging in Astoria playgrounds, elderly Korean women filing wealthy fingernails on the Upper West Side, a fire breaking through an old tenement building in the Bronx, a passerby yelling a stream of motherfuckers at another. There were journalists, sound artists, geographers, urbanists, writers, historians, acoustemologists, anthropologists, musicians, and even bathymetrists, with those complicated devices called multibeam echo sounders, which were plunged into the waterspaces surrounding the city, measuring the depth and contours of the riverbeds, and who knows what else. Everyone, in couples or small groups, surveyed and sampled wavelengths around the city, like we were documenting the last sounds of an enormous beast.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe two of us were paired up and given the task of recording all the languages spoken in the city, over a period of four calendar years. The description of our duties specified: “surveying the most linguistically diverse metropolis on the planet, and mapping the entirety of languages that its adults and children speak.” We were good at it, it turned out; maybe even really good. We made a perfect team of two. Then, after working together for just a few months, we fell in love—completely, irrationally, predictably, and headfirst, like a rock might fall in love with a bird, not knowing who the rock was and who the bird—and when summer arrived, we decided to move in together.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe girl remembers nothing about that period, of course. The boy says he remembers that I was always wearing an old blue cardigan that had lost a couple of buttons and came down to my knees, and that sometimes, when we rode the subway or buses—always with freezing air pouring out—I’d take it off and use it as a blanket to cover him and the girl, and that it smelled of tobacco and was itchy. Moving in together had been a rash decision—messy, confusing, urgent, and as beautiful and real as life feels when you’re not thinking about its consequences. We became a tribe. Then came the consequences. We met each other’s relatives, got married, started filing joint taxes, became a family.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eInventory\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the front seats: he and I. In the glove compartment: proof of insurance, registration, owner’s manual, and road maps. In the backseat: the two children, their backpacks, a tissue box, and a blue cooler with water bottles and perishable snacks. And in the trunk: a small duffle bag with my Sony PCM-D50 digital voice recorder, headphones, cables, and extra batteries; a large Porta-Brace organizer for his collapsible boom pole, mic, headphones, cables, zeppelin and dead-cat windshield, and the 702T Sound Device. Also: four small suitcases with our clothes, and seven bankers boxes (15″ x 12″ x 10″), double-thick bottoms and solid lids.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eCovalence\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite our efforts to keep it all firmly together, there has always been an anxiety around each one’s place in the family. We’re like those problematic molecules you learn about in chemistry classes, with covalent instead of ionic bonds—or maybe it’s the other way around. The boy lost his biological mother at birth, though that topic is never spoken about. My husband delivered the fact to me, in one sentence, early on in our relationship, and I immediately understood that it was not a matter open to further questions. I don’t like to be asked about the girl’s biological father, either, so the two of us have always kept a respectful pact of silence about those elements of our and our children’s pasts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn response to all that, perhaps, the children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They’re like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, but with a touch more narcissism. The girl asks to hear the same stories over and over again. The boy asks about moments of their childhood together, as if they had happened decades or even centuries ago. So we tell them. We tell them all the stories we’re able to remember. Always, if we miss a part, confuse a detail, or if they notice any minimal variation to the version they remember, they interrupt, correct us, and demand that the story be told once more, properly this time. So we rewind the tape in our minds and play it again from the beginning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFoundational Myths\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn our beginning was an almost empty apartment, and a heat wave. On the first night in that apartment—the same apartment we just left behind—the four of us were sitting in our underwear on the floor of the living room, sweaty and exhausted, balancing slices of pizza on our palms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe’d finished unpacking some of our belongings and a few extra things we’d bought that day: a corkscrew, four new pillows, window cleaner, dishwashing soap, two small picture frames, nails, hammer. Next we measured the children’s heights and made the first marks on the hallway wall: 33 inches and 42 inches. Then we’d hammered two nails into the kitchen wall to hang two postcards that had hung in our former, respective apartments: one was a portrait of Malcolm X, taken shortly before his assassination, where he’s resting his head on his right hand and looking intently at someone or something; the other was of Emiliano Zapata, standing upright, holding a rifle in one hand and a saber in the other, a sash around one shoulder, his double cartridge belt crosswise. The glass protecting the postcard of Zapata was still covered in a layer of grime—or is it soot?—from my old kitchen. We hung them both next to the refrigerator. But even after this, the new apartment still looked too empty, walls too white, still felt foreign.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe boy looked around the living room, chewing pizza, and asked:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow what?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd the girl, who was two years old then, echoed him:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes what?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNeither of us found an answer to give them, though I think we did search hard for one, perhaps because that was the question we’d also been silently threading across the empty room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow what? the boy asked again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinally, I answered:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow go brush your teeth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut we haven’t unpacked our toothbrushes yet, the boy said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo go rinse your mouths in the bathroom sink and go to sleep, my husband replied.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey came back from the bathroom, saying they were scared to sleep alone in the new bedroom. We agreed to let them stay in the living room with us, for a while, if they promised to go to sleep. They crawled into an empty box, and after puppying around for the fairest division of cardboard space, they fell into a deep, heavy sleep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy husband and I opened a bottle of wine, and, out the window, we smoked a joint. Then we sat on the floor, doing nothing, saying nothing, just watching the children sleep in their cardboard box. From where we were sitting, we could see only a tangle of heads and butts: his hair damp with sweat, her curls a nest; he, aspirin-assed, and she, apple-bottomed. They looked like one of those couples who’ve overstayed their time together, become middle-aged too fast, grown tired of each other but comfortable enough. They slept in total, solitary companionship. And now and then, interrupting our maybe slightly stoned silence, the boy snored like a drunk man, and the girl’s body released long, sonorous farts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey’d given a similar concert earlier that day, while we rode the subway from the supermarket back to our new apartment, surrounded by white plastic bags full of enormous eggs, very pink ham, organic almonds, corn bread, and tiny cartons of organic whole milk—the enriched and enhanced products of the new, upgraded diet of a family with two salaries. Two or three subway minutes and the children were asleep, heads on each of our laps, tangled humid hair, lovely salty smell like the warm giant pretzels we’d eaten earlier that day on a street corner. They were angelic, and we were young enough, and together we were a beautiful tribe, an enviable bunch. Then, suddenly, one started snoring and the other stared farting. The few passengers who were not plugged into their telephones took note, looked at her, at us, at him, and smiled—difficult to know if in compassion or complicity with our children’s public shamelessness. My husband smiled back at the smiling strangers. I thought for a second I should divert their attention, reflect it away from us, maybe stare accusingly at the old man sleeping a few seats from us, or at the young lady in full jogging gear. I didn’t, of course. I just nodded in acknowledgment, or in resignation, and smiled back at the subway strangers—a tight, buttonhole smile. I suppose I felt the kind of stage fright that comes up in certain dreams, where you realize you went to school and forgot to put on underwear; a sudden and deep vulnerability in front of all those strangers being offered a glimpse of our still very new world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut later that night, back in the intimacy of our new apartment, when the children were asleep and were making all those beautiful noises all over again—real beauty, always unintentional—I was able to listen to them fully, without the burden of self-consciousness. The girl’s intestinal sounds were amplified against the wall of the cardboard box and traveled, diaphanous, across the almost empty living room. And after a little while, from somewhere deep in his sleep, the boy heard them—or so it seemed to us—and replied to them with utterances and mumbles. My husband took note of the fact that we were witnessing one of the languages of the city soundscape, now put to use in the ultimately circular act of conversation:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA mouth replying to a butthole.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI suppressed the desire to laugh, for an instant, but then I noticed that my husband was holding his breath and closing his eyes in order to not laugh. Perhaps we were a little more stoned than we thought. I became undone, my vocal cords bursting into a sound more porcine than human. He followed, with a series of puffs and gasps, his nasal wings flapping, face wrinkling, eyes almost disappearing, his entire body rocking back and forth like a wounded piñata. Most people acquire a frightening appearance in mid-laughter. I’ve always feared those who click their teeth, and found those who laugh without emitting a single sound rather worrisome. In my paternal family, we have a genetic defect, I think, which manifests in snorts and grunts at the very end of the laughing cycle—a sound that, perhaps for its animality, unleashes another cycle of laughter. Until everyone has tears in their eyes, and a feeling of shame overcomes them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI took a deep breath and wiped a tear from my cheek. I realized then that this was the first time my husband and I had ever heard each other laugh. With our deeper laughs, that is—a laugh unleashed, untied, a laugh entire and ridiculous. Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh. My husband and I finally recomposed ourselves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt’s mean to laugh at the expense of our sleeping children, yes? I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes, very wrong.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303681282277,"sku":"NP9780525436461","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780525436461.jpg?v=1767731819","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/lost-children-archive-isbn-9780525436461","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}