You can now preorder my essay collection, Planes Flying Over a Monster, from independent bookstores in the US.
It got starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and is a most anticipated book at LitHub and The Millions.
Some authors I admire said really nice things about it:
“Daniel Saldaña París is simply one of our best living writers and this collection is destined for canonical status. Rarely have I read a book that so thoroughly challenges the boundaries of what nonfiction can be. I was awed by the prose and elevated by the depth and range of thought that imbues these pages, and when I finished reading them all, I started again at the beginning, unwilling and unable to leave the author’s voice behind.” —Chloé Cooper Jones, two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and author of Easy Beauty
«Daniel Saldaña París writes about cities as labyrinths, with each new path twisting through memory and failure and searching and invention, leading readers to corridors where the intimate and the cosmic intersect. Planes Flying Over a Monster is a tremendous work of art.» —Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise and The Third Hotel
«Planes Flying Over a Monster is a coming-of-age story written in the same kind of fragments that make up most minds in the 21st century. A lucid book about the surprising drugs to which we become addicted; a book about broken dreams, missed trips, romantic failures—the unwritten books that make up our identities. An unforgettable book for its self-mockery, at turns brutal and endearing.» —Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born
«Daniel Saldaña París’s Planes Flying Over a Monster is engrossing and wise and surprising; reading it feels like getting caught in an unexpected eight-hour conversation with a fascinating stranger at a dark bar. These are essays about caregiving, desperation, art-making, recklessness and youth, ghost limbs of all kinds; and these are maps of cities: maps of drug dealers and secret meetings, lost poets, lost gardens, long shadows and blood-stained patios. Throughout, I felt utterly surrendered to the sparkling, wry, self-interrogating tenderness of this voice and these fever dreams. I will teach these essays and ponder them and feel grateful for them for the rest of my days.» —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams
One of the essays included in the book was previously published here, in case you are curious. And if you like it, please:
