NEW IN PAPERBACK

THE BEAST: RIDING THE RAILS AND DODGING NARCOS ON THE MIGRANT TRAIL

By OSCAR MARTINEZ. Introduction by FRANCISCO GOLDMAN

"The most extraordinary (and harrowing) book I read this year was Oscar Martinez’s THE BEAST… Beautiful and searing and impossible to put down." – picked by JUNOT DIAZ as his book of 2013 in the FINANCIAL TIMES

“Graceful, incisive writing ... gripping prose and detail.” – NEW YORK TIMES

 "Oscar Martinez does a beautiful job describing a world that is hellish, violent and depraved." – THE ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2013

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1496-the-beast

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One day a few years ago, 300 migrants were kidnapped between the remote desert towns of Altar, Mexico, and Sasabe, Arizona. A local priest got 120 released, many with broken ankles and other marks of abuse, but the rest vanished. OSCAR MARTINEZ, a young writer from El Salvador, was in Altar soon after the abduction, and his account of the migrant disappearances is only one of the harrowing stories he garnered from two years spent traveling up and down the migrant trail from Central America and across the US border. More than a quarter of a million Central Americans make this increasingly dangerous journey each year, and each year as many as 20,000 of them are kidnapped. MARTINEZ writes in powerful, unforgettable prose about clinging to the tops of freight trains; finding respite, work and hardship in shelters and brothels; and riding shotgun with the border patrol. Illustrated with stunning full-color photographs, THE BEAST is the first book to shed light on the harsh new reality of the migrant trail in the age of the narcotraficantes.

This book published to great critical acclaim in 2013 and was named as one of the best books of the year in both the FINANCIAL TIMES and THE ECONOMIST. It is now available for the first time in paperback.

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OSCAR MARTINEZ writes for ElFaro.net, the first online newspaper in Latin America. He is currently writing chronicles and articles for El Faro’s project, Sala Negra, investigating gang violence in Latin America. In 2008, Martinez won the Fernando Benitez National Journalism Prize in Mexico, and in 2009, he was awarded the Human Rights Prize at the Jose Simeon Canas Central American University in El Salvador.

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“The Beast is extraordinary, first, for the courage that Martinez summoned to write it; and, second, for the hidden lives he reveals. No other writer has got this close to a migration that Amnesty International estimates left 70,000 unaccounted for between 2006 and 2012. Read together, the vivid personal stories told here have the force of a novel… [Martinez’s] precise, empathetic and often poetic language summons rage and pity but also admiration in the reader.” – John Paul Rathbone, Financial Times

“The world that Oscar Martinez, a Salvadoran journalist, set out to report on five years ago is so violent, depraved and hellish, you can hardly believe he survived to tell the tale... rugged prose, beautifully translated." – The Economist

“The graceful, incisive writing lifts The Beast from being merely an impressive feat of reportage into the realm of literature.” – Larry Rohter, New York Times

“To understand the dramatic realities faced by the migrants who flee northwards to find work in the United States, Oscar Martinez literally jumped trains and dodged killers. He deserves praise not only for his efforts, and for what he writes about, but because he writes so very well.” – Jon Lee Anderson, staff reporter for the New Yorker

“Martinez’s unrelenting drive as a reporter anchors the stories he tells with gritty detail and an immersive knowledge of his subject matter, but it is this combined with his poet’s eye which makes reading The Beast such a vivid, devastating experience.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

“Oscar Martinez has written a gale-force book, a sweep across the equally daunting criminal and physical landscapes from the vantage point of those at the war’s coalface: Central American migrants crossing Mexico by train, road and on foot through scrub and desert, chasing the phantasmagoria of America, such is the misery or danger back home... Martínez is clearly a wonderful listener – journalism’s rarest and most important attribute – and this makes his prose resound with raw authenticity.” – Ed Vulliamy, The Observer

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PAPERBACK: June 2014 / 224 pages / ISBN 9781781682975 / $16.95 / £9.99 / $19.95 (Canada)

ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN E-BOOK

THE BEAST is available at a 40% discount (paperback), 30% discount (hardback) and 50% discount (ebook) on our website, with free shipping and bundled ebook. Purchasing details here: http://www.versobooks.com/books/1496-the-beast

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