Emiliano Monge

Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue commented on Monge's El cielo árido (2012), and placed him in the group of "Mexico's new writers" (Enrigue sees a watershed in Felipe Calderón start in 2006 of the Mexican Drug War) who are less inclined to employ allegory, and who are much more open in the way they represent the world they inherited... Monge published an extraordinary novel last year, El cielo árido (The barren sky), in which the chaos that violence brings to people's lives is rendered by a desperate narrative device: as the plot moves forward, the narrator changes the names of the characters because nothing is what it seems.

[5] It received positive reviews in the English press, with one critic praising his prose as "crisp" and commenting on "his nonlinear narration [which] creates a heightened sense of unpredictability".

Geurt Frantzen, for Literair Nederland, commented on the "exuberance" that he says characterizes much Latin-American writing, but noted that Monge's style is quite distinct and has a 19th-century flavor to it.

[8] Maarten Steenmeijer, in de Volkskrant, writes that Monge seems to proudly lean on the Latin-American tradition (in "themes, settings, and style") that Roberto Bolaño and others rejected, but without falling back into magical realism.

The Guardian said "Monge balances the dour, apocalyptic brutality of Cormac McCarthy with lively, grim humour – evident in the exasperated exchanges – all of which makes the stark truths driving this flamboyant narrative a little easier to swallow".

The final story is about his father, Carlos Monge Sánchez, who fought as a guerrilla soldier alongside Genaro Vázquez Rojas.