Valeria Luiselli began volunteering as a translator for children in immigration court around five years ago. Drawing on that work, and the activism that followed, she wrote two books: Tell Me How It Ends, an extended essay based on the questionnaire used to interview the children, and her latest, Lost Children Archive (Knopf, $28), a novel about a family traveling by car from New York City to Arizona so that the father, an audio documentarian, can work on a project about the Chiricahua Apache. During the trip, the mother becomes obsessed with news on the radio of migrant children being deported from the US. The novel unfolds in a plurality of voices, sounds, and stories, including Elegies for Lost Children, a novel-within-the-novel made up of a pastiche of other migration and travel stories.
Read the rest of this interview in Bookforum‘s April/May issue.