"This book is one of restless movement and passionate hope." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "A sumptuous work of autofiction that plumbs the mirage-like landscapes of the border region and the frictions that simmer between neighboring nations. In dense, lyrical prose, Rivera Garza weaves in an array of political and historical allusions, highlighting the human costs and environmental degradation caused by the cash crop that created our modern world." -- Time , "The 36 Most Anticipated Books of 2026" "A masterful blend of genres from a shining light of Mexican literature." -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review "An impassioned testament to resilience and struggle. It's not to be missed." -- Publishers Weekly , starred review "Rivera Garza's genre-bending work ultimately pays homage to the too-often invisible laborers who cultivate the land and build the cities on both sides of the border." --Lorinda Toledo, Los Angeles Times "A historical novel braided with deep personal narrative and research, creating something unique and almost indefinable.

" --Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2026" "An enlightening glimpse into histories both familial and national." --Tobias Carroll, Inside Hook "It's only through understanding the historical cycles that shaped her past that Rivera Garza can make sense of the fears and longings that haunt her present. In Autobiography of Cotton , she lays out a method for the rest of us to undertake the same excavation." --Caroline Tracey, Southwest Review "Garza's eloquent and beautifully written book is not quite a memoir, a novel, or a work of history, although it contains elements of all three. By imagining the lives of her Mexican grandparents amid a cotton pickers' strike in the 1930s, she builds a story that is not just about Mexican history, but also about laborers everywhere demanding fair wages and humane treatment." --Joan Gaylord, Christian Science Monitor " Autobiography of Cotton reclaims and reconstructs long-forgotten histories in long-dismissed corners of our continent, revealing the political and ancestral mythologies perpetually refracted and distilled by the Mexico-US borderlands. Cristina Rivera Garza has become an oracle of the in-between, confirming, with each new book, her status as one of North America's greatest living writers." --Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River "In the vast field between history, memory, and erasure, a sea of white gold: the cotton trade in postrevolutionary northern Mexico, and the tangled narrative roots of political, ecological, and epistemic violence beneath.

Cristina Rivera Garza--mythmaker, archivist, historiographer, etymologist, and philosopher--brings down the veil between parallel countries and parallel histories and reveals the blood-soaked blossom between them: Gossypium hirsutum , crop and capital, thirsty driver of the economies, borders, bodies, and timelines that split along this continent's rivers. Autobiography of Cotton is a triumph of the critical and speculative imagination." --Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Magical/Realism.