In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro, Jazmina Barrera’s deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life. Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research—the correspondence, photos, and books—serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work. Who was Elena Garro, really? She was a writer, a founder of “magical realism”, a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and theI Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination. The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.

Forty years ago, the world nearly ended. Be is an old robot who was there, and doesn’t want to think about what happened, or what role they played in that conflict. They have settled into a life of isolation in the abandoned ruins of an old mill in the former New York Botanical Gardens, disinterested in what has happened in the outside world since they stepped away from the war. Someone out there, though, has not forgotten about them, and when they are attacked, their person vandalized, and one of their leg stolen, they set out to find the thief accompanied by a cyborg dog and a human mechanic. The world has changed, but the recovery from the war is uneven and faltering, and Be begins to suspect a malicious hand trying to rekindle the old conflict and finish what was started. In order to stop them, Be needs to come to terms with both their own past and who they have become, and how everything and everyone else they knew has changed in their absence. Being left alone is no longer an option, and peace may be impossible. This is a story about coming to terms with your past, with who you’ve become and who you still want to be: a tale of resilence and hope, an ode to those struggling to become whole in a world half-broken.