Margo Glantz Apparitions review and information of the content of the 1996 novel by the Mexican writer. Charco Press will publish the English translation of Apariciones, the Margo Glantz novel, on January 20, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.
Margo Glantz Apparitions review
- “I believe that with this book Glantz has renewed the genre (…). She has recovered the pristine nakedness of the body and the energy of its most secret drives.” (Augusto Roa Bastos)
- “Inspired by the erotic tradition of mysticism, Margo Glantz explores the limits of the female body; between the dark and the profane, the beautiful and the disturbing (…) The novel (…) is always accompanied by music, which turns the writing into a marvellous score.” (La Vanguardi)
- “Glantz writes about and from the body, exploring through words the limits of meaning to make literature the deepest of joys.” (El Mundo)
- “Margo Glantz uses the model of the erotic novel to subvert it with an existential component, and dialogues across time with Pasolini, Kawabata and Bataille.” (infoLibre)
Apparitions
- Author: Margo Glantz (Mexico)
- Book type: Mexican novel, erotic novel
- Original: Apariciones (1996)
- English Translation: Ellen Jones
- Publisher: Charco Press
- Released: January 20, 2026
- Length: 128 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: £ 11.99
- Order book from: Amazon
Blurb of the 1996 novel by Margo Glantz
Two nuns, and one obsessed mother, doing everything thing in their power to achieve communion with the one they love.
Sister Lugarda de la Encarnación takes the lash, and an unnamed mother gets down on her hands and knees—sacramental postures demanded by inscrutable men. Apparitions is a novel of ecstasy pursued, desire transmogrified into devotion, and obedience as a passionately pursued, not entirely free choice.
Erotic, and suffused with painting, music, art, it’s an incantatory exploration of what it means to abandon the world, and to use your body—in pain, and in pleasure—as a way of finally coming to know the divine.
Margo Glantz was born January 28, 1930 in Mexico City. She fused Yiddish literature, Mexican culture, and French tradition to create experimental new works of literature. Glanz graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1953 and earned a doctorate in Hispanic literature from the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Mexico to teach literature and theater history at UNAM. A prolific essayist, she is best known for her 1987 autobiography Las genealogías (The Genealogies), which blended her experiences of growing up Jewish in Catholic Mexico with her parents’ immigrant experiences. She also wrote fiction and nonfiction that shed new light on the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Among her many honours, she won the Magda Donato Prize for Las genealogías and received a Rockefeller Grant (1996) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998). She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (2005), the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (2010), and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2011). Glantz was awarded the 2004 National Prize for Sciences and the prestigious FIL Prize in 2010. She received Chile’s Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award in 2015.