Ten Planets

‘Brilliant, ecstatic and playful, Ten Planets is the work of one of the most original and prodigiously gifted writers at work today. The grammar of a nose, a skeleton in a shoebox, a consciousness acquiring bacterium and a sentient house – the infinite worlds of this story collection are further proof that Herrera is a writer of boundless talent.’ Katie Kitamura ---- ‘Ten Planets is exuberantly inventive and darkly humorous. Yuri Herrera has a gift for concealing entire worlds in small packages. Invariably the strange places in these jack-in-the-box fictions, with their peculiar customs and weird creatures, turn out to be familiar, not alien societies but our own, not distant planets but the house across the street. Monstrous and magical by turns, and very often both, Herrera’s stories are irresistible.’ Ivan Vladislavic ---- ‘Ten Planets is – if this isn’t too reductive an analogy – a tapas selection of tiny delights, individually tasty, infinitely moreish, and adding up to a very satisfying whole.’ James Lovegrove, Financial Times ---- ‘Startling concepts another writer might take hundreds of pages to explore are distilled into perfect miniatures. It’s tempting to gulp them down at once, but such rich fare is best taken slowly, allowed to digest.’ Lisa Tuttle, The Guardian ---- ‘A new collection of short stories from the beloved Mexican author Yuri Herrera. Ten Planets (translated by Lisa Dillman) is bold, philosophical science fiction.’ I-D Magazine, ‘All the books to be excited for in 2023’ ---- ‘The characters that populate Yuri Herrera’s first collection of stories inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present.’ London Review Bookshop, ‘Gayle’s New Year Picks 2023’ ---- ‘Sheffield-based And Other Stories previously published Mexican political scientist Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World to critical acclaim. In February it publishes his book of short stories, Ten Planets, translated by Lisa Dillman, and blending the best of science fiction, noir and the philosophical parables of Calvino and Borges.’ Big Issue North, ‘Indies to Watch in 2023’ ---- In Ten Planets, Herrera shifts from the fantastical (monsters and aliens) to the eerily materialist (a bacterium achieves sentience) like a boy flipping through the pages of a beloved comic book: with delight and conviction.’ LitHub, ‘Most anticipated books of 2023’ ---- ‘Ten Planets encapsulates Hererra’s mastery of language, his unique imagination where always something unexpected awaits you.’ Morning Star ---- ‘At times so dazzling and drenched in ideas, that the reader must take pause, regain breath, think and think again, indeed turn back to the start, read anew and be rewarded anew … These odd, unsettling encounters ring in the mind like enlivening waking dreams, their significance spilling in many directions, inviting us to toy with and complete them in our own ways.’ New Internationalist ---- ‘There are vignettes of imagined futures, twinkling with Borgesian promise, placed beside hard-boiled noirish pieces that expose the absurdity of bureaucratic systems.’ The Big Issue ‘Yuri Herrera’s expansive, delicate world-building makes the slim book seem bigger than it is – because of how far and fast the stories go.’ Word Factory ---- ‘A collection of fanciful, philosophical science fictions by one of Mexico’s finest novelists.’ Vulture ---- ‘These stories don’t simply imagine new worlds – they create them.’ El País ---- Bookseller Praise for Ten Planets: 'Strange, surreal, and brimming with playfulness.' John Bittles, No Alibis Bookstore ---- 'Leave the world with everything you think you know behind and depart on a journey of exploring new possibilities, new realities and questioning what you take to be true. Absolutely mesmerising!' Lea Deppe, Bookhaus ---- 'With Yuri Herrera's Ten Planets fiction has finally caught up with the 21st century. The short stories inside are quantum pieces existing in two places at once. Read altogether they have a cumulative effect that envelops the reader with a warm sense of the subliminal and supranatural yet never leaving the mundane behind. This is such lyrical, enchanting, inventive prose from a formidable imagination at work.' Ray Mattinson, Blackwell's, Oxford ---- 'Whether plumbing the darker depths of our psyche, or soaring into ecstatic expanses of hope, these small, surreal stories - glittering with invention and shards of charming, unnerving naivety - each have the undeniable gravity of a collapsing star. You'll find your mind orbiting them long into the night.' Joe Hedinger, The Book Hive ---- 'An excellent and intriguing book. The ideas and variety are such that at no point does it run out of steam or originality.' Keith Cowans, The Book Vault ---- Praise for Yuri Herrera: 'Yuri Herrera floored me ... seeming to fall from an alternative sky.' Patti Smith ---- 'Yuri Herrera must be a thousand years old. He must have travelled to hell, and heaven, and back again. He must have once been a girl, an animal, a rock, a boy, and a woman. Nothing else explains the vastness of his understanding.' Valeria Luiselli ---- 'Yuri Herrera is Mexico's greatest novelist. His spare, poetic narratives and incomparable prose read like epics compacted into a single perfect punch-they ring your bell, your being, your soul.' Francisco Goldman ---- 'Herrera's metaphors grasp the freedom, and the alarming disorientation, of transition and translation.' Maya Jaggi, The Guardian ---- 'Playful, prophetic, unnerving books that deserve to be read several times.' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times ---- 'Signs Preceding the End of the World is short, suspenseful . . . outlandish and heartbreaking.' John Williams, New York Times ---- 'Herrera packs The Transmigration of Bodies with the sex, booze and nihilism of a better Simenon novella.' Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal ---- 'My favorite of the new Mexican writers.' John Powers, NPR Fresh Air