The most recommended books about Mexico City

Julian Simpole is an experienced teacher who worked in a Brighton school which blended talented individual pupils with some who seemed psychopathic contenders for mass murder.

The bigoted and tyrannical  Headmaster himself seems hardly more civilised than his more psychotic pupils, and the novice practitioner of the pedagogic arts is buffeted from all sides as he falls in love with a girl he is convinced is a pre-ordained legacy from a previous existence.

Is this book an exposé of early 1980s Stakhanovite teaching, or a nostalgic reminder of comparatively idyllic school life before the current metropolitan street plague of knife-wielding child killers?

Edward Gorey is one of my biggest influences as an author/illustrator and perhaps the biggest source of inspiration behind my book.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies was my very first encounter with Edward Gorey and with the adult picture book genre. I can confidently say that I wouldn’t be writing and illustrating picture books if I hadn’t encountered this tiny book, in a gallery in Mexico City around 2006.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies is an alphabet book that tells the stories of 26 children and how each tragically dies.“ A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears, C is for Clara who wasted away…”

What blew me away is how, with a few words and the simplest of illustrations, so many dissonant qualities and contradictions could exist on the same page—lightness and darkness; music and silence; tragedy and humor; life and death.

Few scholars have done more to demystify the nature of crime in Mexico than Pablo Piccato. His book City of Suspects is a nuanced history that reveals that the very meaning of crime was contested in early twentieth-century Mexico City. While Mexican elites tried to define criminals as a social class, the urban poor, who experienced crime as a part of their everyday lives, saw crime as an individual phenomenon. This book, like the others on this list, is also a story about the ways people used and thought about public space. At a time when Mexico’s government sought to transform the capital into a modern metropolis along the lines of Paris or New York, the poor resisted efforts to exclude them from that future.

One of the things I love about reading short story collections is that I can read a story, enjoy it, and then put the collection aside and then read another story later.

This was a short story collection I literally could not put down. As soon as I finished one story, I needed to turn the page and see what the next story had to offer. This collection explores the supernatural lore of Mexico while spanning its history and peering into its near future.

My favorite stories were “Bed of Scorpions” about a brother and sister running a con and “Cemetery Man” about a mad scientist during the Mexican Revolution resurrecting soldiers.

Just when I thought I was done with vampires, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things came along.

I was burned out on the genre. Most of the characters in vampire stories are rich, privileged, and frankly, not that interesting. Atl, the main character in Certain Dark Things, is the exception.

A descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, she finds herself caught between the rival vampire clans that dominate Mexico City. When she develops an unexpected attachment to a street kid named Domingo, her life gets even more complicated. 

Domingo could have been nothing but a Renfield, a plaything for her vampire lead. But Moreno-Garcia explores the tender bond that develops between them, a connection that puts both in jeopardy. An engrossing new spin on the vampire tale.

McSweeney’s is a singular publisher of beautifully designed, smart, and unusual books. This one is a collection of writers devoted to imagining the effects of climate change in the near future. Sad, wistful, compelling stories, written from myriad global perspectives and based on climate science. One that has stuck with me is a story called “1740” by Asja Bakic, a Croatian writer. But if you prefer a big, classic novel in the “cli fi” literature, look to the works of Kim Stanley Robinson. 

As a Mexican living in the UK, this story deeply speaks to me, as I truly identify with the characters in Tania’s book. This story reminded me of all of the complicated emotions of migrating, the things that I miss when I am not in Mexico, while reminding me of appreciating the present even more, as there are always things to appreciate, enjoy, and love wherever you are.

The illustrations of Tania are full of life, delicate, and convey in amazing detail the lively atmospheres of Mexico City and New York; the city where she was born, and the city where she currently lives.

Valeria Luiselli dissects the odd systems and networks of our world’s cities and reveals in their hidden corners and corridors strange and magical identities. Luiselli’s essays further interrogate a city’s relationship to the bodies, cultures, artifacts, and languages that inhabit its spaces. In the essay, “Flying Home,” Luiselli journeys to Mexico City, the place of her birth, and, staring out of her airplane window, considers the city’s layout from this great height. This act of “mapping” according to her extraordinary vantage (suspended in flight), allows for a greater, incantatory meditation on our various perceptions of “home,” and how said perceptions depend as much on the imagination and on ephemeral memories as they do on reality.   

Mexica is an Aztec Princess faced with her greatest challenge. She must pass her initiation test to be crowned the ruler of her people.

Set in the time of the Aztecs in what is now Mexico City, Mexica sets off to solve the three riddles with her (huge) cat, Elote, when unbeknownst to her the enemy of her people, the Tlaxcala, have launched an attack. Quickly they team up with a helpful Axolotl salamander who helps them find food and confuse the enemy… though not on purpose and make great strides in the initiation.

The twists and turns in this really wonderful story are quite a ride for the reader. The art is excellent and adds to the story and the atmosphere and is easy to follow for the young audience. What I particularly like about this book and this whole series, is that it features a princess character from… show more.

Read this fascinating historical fiction novel to find out how it was possible for Lindbergh’s wife to wind up intact and capable of love, despite the tragedies that beset her.

Few people realize that she was the first female glider pilot! She became not only his co-pilot, but the pilot of her own life as she got older and pursued her own interests. Anne Morrow proved herself to be—in many ways—more heroic than her husband.

This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.

Juan Villoro’s memoir takes readers on a tour of contemporary Mexico City that is also a meditation on chilangos’ (Mexico City residents) relationship with the past. The book bounces between the author’s childhood in the neighborhoods of Mixcoac and Del Valle and the present day, traversing the sprawling metropolis and giving readers a sense of its scale and complexity. Through Villoro, we meet the sewer cleaners and tire repairmen who keep the city humming. We visit monuments like the Angel of Independence and Chapultepec Castle and the bustling spaces of Santo Domingo Plaza and Tepito—places that seem to hover between past and present and myth and reality. At once spry and erudite, the book is an immensely satisfying rumination on the city and its people. 

This wonderful dark novel about H.P. Lovecraft’s relationship with a young fan, R.H. Barlow, implicitly makes the case for Lovecraft’s continuing relevance in popular culture—even as he is widely condemned for his undoubted racism.

I found one of the most human and multi-dimensional portraits of Lovecraft I’ve ever read in this book. Barlow himself is no less compelling in these pages. The prose is vivid and immaculate. If you love language and are interested in Lovecraft, The Night Ocean is a fantastic read.

This novel explores the ferociousness of grief when a couple loses their child.

The mother places a sliver of her dead son’s lung into a jar and it grows into a monster. A tender and horrific book that explores the limits of love. I loved the different perspectives in the book and found it quite moving to see how each character processes grief in their own individual ways.  

This was the first book on the literary representation of the Japanese and Nikkeijin in Peruvian fiction. It analyzes literature published by both Nikkei (the Nisei authors José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato) and non-Nikkei Peruvian authors (Mario Vargas Llosa, Mario Bellatin, etc) from 1996 to 2005. The book closes with interviews with six authors whose works are examined in the book: Miguel Francisco Gutiérrez Correa, Carmen Ollé Nava, Pilar Dughi Martínez, Mario Bellatin, José Watanabe, and Doris Moromisato. This important study opened the way for many other recent explorations of the traces of Japaneseness in Peruvian literature as well as the relevance of Japanese-Peruvian writing. 

I had long meant to read Bolano’s seminal novel and was not disappointed.

With a revolving cast of characters, generating cross-currents of intersecting subplots and drama, The Savage Detectives takes you on a kaleidoscopic spin through the fringes, lore, and shadowlands of Mexico, covering different time periods.

Part offbeat odyssey, part crime story, part derelict dissertation on tropes and archetypes, Bolano’s multi-form narrative comprises an adventure that is wary of its own movements.

For a couple of decades, Restall has been at the vanguard of a group of historians developing what is known as the New Conquest History, an effort to balance the Eurocentrism of earlier histories of the Aztec-Spanish War and its aftermath. I’ve used an earlier book of his, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, in my teaching, as it is succinctly argued and provokes students to think critically about the early history of Latin America. This book builds on that and narrows the focus to how the historic encounter between Moctezuma, the Great Speaker of Tenochtitlan and the most powerful individual in Mesoamerica, and Cortés (on November 8, 1519) has been reinterpreted in the years since.  It ranges across five centuries of history, art, and aesthetics, and pop culture to poke holes in narratives that center Cortés’ presumed military brilliance and problematize notions that Moctezuma considered the Spaniards gods… show more.

The best of biography and a passionate and enthralling account by Selina Hastings of the life of her bohemian father Jack, who escaped his ultra-conservative family to pursue a career as a painter.

With his beautiful Italian wife Cristina, the daughter of the legendary Marchesa Casati famed for her outrageously ornate masked balls, he left Europe for the New World.

They firstly settled in Australia then on the Island of Moorea in the South Pacific, eventually reaching California where Hastings met the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo.

After persuading Rivera to take him on as his painting assistant, he and Cristina spent four years in Mexico City before returning to England. He later taught fresco painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in the 1950s - just a few years before I became a student at the Southampton Row establishment and in due… show more.

I think that we should all make an effort to understand people who are not from our cultural stew; people who seem different, but wind up being like us; once we get to know them.

Patrick Oster is not a sociologist, a psychologist, or an ugly American. He could be Joe Blow from down the block who decides to go to Mexico, to get to know the Mexican people. He does not make an effort to know all the people, he simply makes friends with those who are friendly, and leaves the others alone; just the way he would do in America.

I feel that this book is a wonderful example of what can come from an honest exploration and a warm writing style.

I recommend Joseph Rykwert’s The Seduction of Place for Rykwert’s wonderful reflections on the relation between people and their cities, and on the essential questions of why cities succeed – or why they fail to work successfully for their inhabitants.