Valeria Luiselli Books in Order

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her childhood also included time in Wisconsin, Costa Rica, South Korea, and India before she returned to Mexico City as a teenager. Moving between countries gave her an early, practical understanding of how places and languages can shape a person's sense of home.

She studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, then continued her studies in New York, earning a PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her arrival in the city came through an internship with the United Nations, and New York later became one of the important settings in her work.

Luiselli began publishing in Spanish. Her first book-length work, Papeles falsos, was an essay collection later translated as Sidewalks. Her first novel, Los ingrávidos, followed and appeared in English as Faces in the Crowd, translated by Christina MacSweeney.

In Sidewalks, she walks, cycles, reads, and thinks her way through cities including Mexico City, Venice, and New York. The essays are interested in overlooked corners, translation, memory, and the small details that make a place feel lived in.

Faces in the Crowd moves between a mother writing in Mexico City, her earlier life in New York, and the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen. It sets up the kind of story Luiselli often returns to: one where writers, readers, ghosts, and memories keep crossing into one another's paths.

Her books rarely stay in one lane.

That is especially clear in The Story of My Teeth, a comic, strange novel about the auctioneer Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez Sánchez and his collection of supposedly famous teeth. Luiselli wrote it in chapters as part of a project with workers at a Jumex juice factory in Mexico, building the book through an unusual exchange of drafts, conversations, and new material.

Her nonfiction took on a more urgent public focus with Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Based on her volunteer work translating for undocumented children facing deportation in the United States, it looks closely at the questions used to gather a child's story and at the limits of any system that asks young people to explain danger, loss, and displacement.

Those concerns continue in Lost Children Archive. The novel follows a family driving from New York to Arizona while stories of migrant children, Apache history, recordings, maps, and family strain gather around them. Luiselli is drawn to the hard question of how to tell another person's story without turning it into something too neat or simple.

Her work often features travelers, children, translators, parents, writers, and people trying to make sense of the records left behind by others. In 2019, she received a MacArthur Fellowship. Lost Children Archive went on to win the 2021 Dublin Literary Award. She lives in New York City and continues to write alongside her work in university settings.