Ursula Villarreal-Moura Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is a published author.

She was born in San Antonio, Texas, where she grew up. She attended Middlebury College and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with her MFA. She is a VONA/Voices fellow. She has written various articles, books, and reviews that have appeared in such places as Catapult, Tin House, Midnight Breakfast, Prairie Schooner, Story, Washington Square, Gulfcoast, and Wigleaf Top 50.

Ursula won the 2012 CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry Contest. She has seen her writing nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and made the longlist for the Best American Short Stories 2015.

She is the author of the 2024 novel Like Happiness and the author of the 2022 collection, Math for the Self-Crippling.

Like Happiness is the debut fictional book from Ursula Villarreal-Moura. If you have been looking for contemporary fiction featuring LGBTQIA+ theses and love reading new voices in literature, this is the story for you.

This is an intense debut that deals with the complexities of topics such as power, gender, and fame. It is all told through the story of one young woman and her less than constructive relationship with a famous and well-regarded writer.

The year in this story is 2015, and the main character is a young woman named Tatum Vega. She is an optimistic woman and she feels that the choices that she has made mean that her life is finally coming together and falling into place just as she intended.

Everything is going well. She lives in Chile, a place where it is always sunny, sharing her times with her partner Vera. She has a great job and spends much of her day at the museum where she is surrounded by art while she works.

She also loves the new life that she is creating. She loves that it also helps her to forget the ten years that she whiled away in the New York City area, all in the orbit of M. Dominguez, an author who is both famous and also considered brilliant.

Tatum sees her peaceful life disrupted when she gets some call from a reporter for the United States requesting an interview with her. The separation that she has been so careful to put between the present and the past has started to crumble.

The reason why the reporter is calling is to corroborate a story where Dominguez has been accused of assault. Now Tatum has to look at the relationship that took up so much of her time as an early adult. Lots of questions come to the forefront.

She’s wondering what happened between them, as well as trying to figure out the reasons why she is still having such a tough time with the impression that their relationship has left on her own life.

This story takes place using a dual narrative, where it goes between the present day moment as well as a letter that was written from Tatum to Dominguez. This story goes into the nuances of a relationship that is imbalanced as well as complicated. In the process, it’ll catalyze a reckoning that deals with everything from power dynamics to memory, celebrity, gender, and Latinx identity.

Check out this book personally to catch Ursula Villareal-Moura’s debut on the full length fictional novel literary scene and experience a dynamic new voice in fiction!

Math for the Self-Crippling is a flash fiction collection from Ursula Villareal-Moura. Starting in the nineties of San Antonio and moving forward to the present, these are stories that are told in the first, second, and third person.

The stories deal with many different topics, from the link between mysticism and religiosity, to Chicana imagination, to losing belongings and family, going through marital strife, experiencing mental health, and moving through dream travel.

It is funny but also dark at times, and goes into how you can take damage in your life and still get better and make the day your own. An interesting collection that you won’t want to miss that Zinzi Clemmons has said crackles with originality and wit.