The University of Arizona Press
Date: Sunday, March 8, 2026
Time: 6 p.m., EDT
Where: Topos Too Bookstore, 59-22 Myrtle Ave, New York, NY
Topos Too Bookstore hosts the New York book launch for Carne de Dios: A Novel with author Homero Aridjis’s and translator Chloe Garcia Roberts. They will be in conversation with Mike Soto. Through Aridjis’s lyrical prose, vividly translated by Garcia Roberts, we first journey to the mountains of Huautla de Jiménez in 1957, where María Sabina’s veladas—mushroom rituals—draw seekers from across the world forever altering the course of Sabina’s life and the world’s perception of Mexico’s Indigenous traditions. Aridjis was born in Contepec, Michoacán, Mexico. He has written fifty-one books of poetry and prose and has won many important literary prizes including the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Formerly Mexico’s ambassador to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and UNESCO, he is also the president emeritus of PEN International. Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from Spanish and Chinese; and she is deputy editor of the Harvard Review and a lecturer of poetry at MIT.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
In the remote mountains of Oaxaca, the Beatniks have arrived.
María Sabina, the renowned Mazatec healer, spends her days in the small town of Huautla de Jiménez selling produce at the market and foraging under the new moon for the sacred mushrooms that grow near her home—her Holy Children, Carne de Dios, or Flesh of God. But her life changes forever when an amateur mycologist from New York, with a cameraman in tow, visits her to experience for himself the mushroom ceremony, or velada, he knows only from whispers in anthropological records. When he publishes an unauthorized article about his experience in LIFE Magazine 1957, the stage is set for an explosive encounter between the burgeoning international counterculture and the woman who became an unwilling icon of the psychedelic revolution.
