Yuri Herrera
Posted in 2025-2025 Readings and Talks Announcements
February 10, 2026 at 7:00PM ET
Location: Copley Formal Lounge
Join us for an evening with Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera, moderated by Lannan Visiting Chair Rabih Alameddine. Book signing and reception to follow.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by February 3rd to lannan@georgetown.edu. A good faith effort will be made to fulfill requests made after February 3rd.
Excerpt from Season of the Swamp
–Yuri Herrera
The most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the drumming; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the dances; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the concerts; no, in a way it was kind of the hippodrome, which was fun and also pivotal though in another way; no, the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was the inner courtyard, yes, that might be it; or maybe the most pivotal thing to happen in the weeks that followed was that he met the canaille and learned what funk was; or that he more or less figured out what Thisbee might or might not have done. What happened in the weeks that followed was that they stopped feeling like weeks and instead sometimes felt like minutes, and the minutes sometimes felt like days, because the city—first gradually, then vertiginously—stopped being a city of cons and wheeling and dealing and became a living creature, an animal that initially began to wriggle and writhe as if shaking off sleep or fleas and then as if nothing in the world mattered more than dancing.
Even sailors had their own music, and not just inner music, not just the singsong bitch and moan all down the street by the levee, singsong bitch and moan about making no money—money was one word he did know, a key word if ever there was—and about other things he didn’t understand; at the front, a fiddler and a man with a military drum that he beat with military talent, bom-bom, bom-buh-bom, rhythmic and energetic, while the fiddler played dance tunes, quick and peppy, that nobody danced to, since they were all walking, everyone but him, who accompanied the fiddle by nodding in time to the melody as if there were dancing couples doing little leaps and turns inside it.
On and on they walked, and saw the Théâtre d’Orléans, which was staging a production of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, a very old opera, as well as Le prophète (Le prophète!), which had premiered in Paris only four years ago, so basically yesterday. What a place, forever renewing itself as though the swamp made no matter.
The streets were perpetually under construction. Now that he and Pepe were staying at the boat-house in the third ward, he could walk to work, traversing the old quadrant to get to the printshop. He’d learn to sidestep the holes on one street and then find the next day that workers were patching it, only for it to begin crumbling again, then be patched again, over and over. The streets were under slapdash repair more often than they were traversable. Occasionally the workers would rush around, portraits of exemplarity; more often they’d sit on the sidewalk to smoke, drink, and sing. There was a lot of singing. Cabañas wouldn’t let him touch the movable type. His job was to stack the ads or notices or pamphlets or invitations and deliver them. On rare occasion he was tipped a coin for his trouble, but basically he had to make do with what Cabañas paid him; in exchange, between trips through the quadrant (most deliveries went either there or to the anglo ward, on the other side of Canal) and reading the paper at the printshop, he started to see that despite the cold, the city was hotting up. “Carnival,” Cabañas said. “It’s like everybody gets an itch and it can only be scratched by going nuts.”