Jazmina Barrera : The Queen of Swords

Jorge Luis Borges called her the “Tolstoy of Mexico” and César Aira the “greatest novelist of the 20th century,” so why is it likely that you haven’t read or even heard of Elena Garro before now? And given that Garro was, like her fantastical stories, not beholden to the truth when accounting her own life, and given that her own life was, in its radical shifts and contradictions, so wildly resistant to comprehension, how does one present her now to the world? Jazmina Barrera may be the perfect writer to do so as her new Garro-centric book The Queen of Swords is as unconventional as her subject. Full of cats and revolution, Tarot and the CIA, conspiracy and embroidery, this anti-biographical love letter to another writer also becomes a portrait of Jazmina as well. For the bonus audio archive Jazmina contributes a reading from Elena Garro’s story “When We Were Dogs,” in Christina MacSweeney’s translation. To learn how to

You can listen to Jazmina Barrera : The Queen of Swords online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Jazmina Barrera : The Queen of Swords is an episode from Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry by David Naimon, Milkweed Editions.

This episode is 1:58:43 long.

This episode was published on Dec 6, 2025.

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