New From the Porch: Transparent Investigations

Transparent Investigations

by Andres Osuna-Vega and Franco Strong

$15 US

167 pages

ISBN-10 : 1948920190

ISBN-13 : 978-1948920193

A rail-line leading to purgatory. A woman’s identity fractured across international borders. Detectives haunted by desert hallucinations. These are the stories contained within Transparent Investigations.

Transparent Investigations is an arresting work that showcases the themes, obsessions, and talents of a young author—Andres Osuna-Vega. Perhaps best known as the last member of the Realidad Ausente collective, Osuna-Vega’s work centers on the US/Mexico border and the characters who occupy this distinctly liminal region. In haunting prose, the author renders a topography of these borderlands, along with the borders between violence, identity, fiction, and the opaque logic operating beneath the surface of marginalized lives.

The publication of Transparent Investigations marks the first-time multiple works of Osuna-Vega have been collected into a single volume. His reputation as an author of unique, singular vision rests upon a handful of short stories and poems published in small, independent literary magazines—as well as his brief association with the Realidad Ausente collective. After the dissolution of the Realidad Ausente, Osuna-Vega has ceased to pursue publication for his own works. The stories and poem collected in this volume were taken directly from his personal notebooks. As such, they offer an intimate, nuanced glimpse of an author at the summit of his talents.

“The author of these short stories deals with the boundary line that divide our disjointed souls…You will not find easy solutions here.” –Richard Jacobs

“His fiction stories are the distillation of the lessons of Realidad Ausente…He’ll be the one to carry this movement forward.”—Aaron Butler

“Mature beyond his age.” –Luisana Fragoso

“Literature which operates almost as a coded cipher.”—Franco Strong