Cars on Fire

"These stylish, often strange stories are like cars on fire themselves--cacophonous, melodious, tragic--and each burn like a symbol of urban resistance. An important and unique contribution to immigrant and protest literature of the Americas."--Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig

"Revolution is being waged outside the windows and inside the heads of Mónica Ramón Ríos's characters, obsessed by elsewheres, clawing away the veneer of the everyday. Like a throng of eloquent protestors, electric with rage, these stories occupy a gritty intersection where literature, film, history, and dream cross paths."--Esther Allen

"Cars on Fire describes a prismatic, constellated world in highly chiseled, original prose. This is a book as wise as it is clever, probing, playful, irreverent, original, as if written by an old Kafkan soul in a modern-day, variegated New York, who, with a telling smile and nod to the reader, has acceded to open an ancient portal for a split-second and share a private glimpse of this newly absurd, charged and wispy world in transformation."--Valerie Miles

"Ríos's mesmerizing English-language debut invokes an array of writers, auto-plant workers, Marxists, immigrants, actresses, and murderers. Ríos's themes are unwaveringly contemporary--LGBTQ and feminist issues; immigrant life; politics--but it is artistry, not dogma, that guides her prose. This is art house literature at its best: provocative, alluring, and uncompromising."--Publishers Weekly, starred review