This Is Not Miami is Fernanda Melchor’s newly translated collection of cronicás or, as she put it in the author’s note, relatos exploring the underbelly of Veracruz, where readers are forced to directly confront the psyches of disturbingly sympathetic murderers, trace community formation through informal retribution and immolation, and bear witness to the carnal, fetid atrocities of dismemberment. Melchor is particularly challenging for translators: she’s perhaps best-known for her propulsive multi-page sentences with shifting narrators, the blending of reportage and mythology, the peppering of slang, and a palpable sense of grime that seeps off the page.
