Archive 48 Release Party: The Earthly Days of Jose Revueltas

Binational publisher Archive 48, dedicated to Mexican and U.S. literature, launches its U.S. wing with the first-ever English translation of an important work by  Jose Revueltas. Join us to celebrate its release.

Translator Matthew Gleeson and publisher Pedro Jiménez celebrate the publication of Earthly Days by José Revueltas.

Mexican author Revueltas was a lifelong militant whose political activities stretched from the 1930s Communist Party to the 1968 student movement—and sent him to prison several times. His important writing career included prize-winning novels that lay bare the underbelly of Mexican society, as well as screenplays for noir films during Mexican cinema’s Golden Age. But most of his dark and complex work still remains neglected in English.

Earthly Days, originally published in 1949, is a quintessential Revueltas novel that marries Communist struggle, noir narrative, and psychological depth exploration. It also turned out to be his most controversial: it was withdrawn from circulation when Mexican Marxist circles attacked it as politically heretical, and this is its first appearance in English.

Matthew Gleeson is a writer and translator based in Mexico. With Audrey Harris, he co-translated The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dávila (New Directions, 2018). With Giada Diano, he co-edited Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Norton/Liveright, 2015).

Pedro Jimenez is an editor, translator and essayist. He has translated Etel Adnan’s Seasons into Spanish—to be published in Mexico by Archive48 in 2019. He has written various articles and art reviews in English and Spanish for digital outlets and print journals. He is the founder of Archive48, a bilingual publishing project based in San Francisco.

Archive 48‘s goal is the publication of compelling literary works in affordable editions. Like the face of Janus, Archivo 48 looks north and south to bring the best of contemporary and modernist literature from Mexico and the United States cross borders. They seek books that have not been fully recognized by the literary status quo of each country, in an effort to open new conversations.