Book of the Month
The Night
Author: Rodrigo Blanco Calderon
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN-10: 644210401 / ISBN-13: 978-1644210406
SUMMARY:
Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. Real and fictional characters, most of them are writers, exchange the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began with the energy crisis. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night; and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles. The author shifts between crime fiction and metafiction, cautioning readers that the events retold are both true and manipulated. This is a political novel about the financial crisis and socio-political division in Venezuela from 2008 to 2010. The title of the book, originally also in English, is a gesture towards Chavism’s failure to resist US influence. Yet, the form is unapologetically literary, a reflection on the depiction and distortion of reality through storytelling. Blanco Calderón said about the potential of language, “I am convinced that all the evil in the world begins in them: in words.”
About the Author:
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón is a writer and editor. He has received various awards for his stories both inside and outside Venezuela. In 2007 he was invited to join the Bogotá39 group, which brings together the best Latin American narrators under thirty-nine years old. In 2013 he was a guest writer on the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2014, his story “Emuntorios” was included in Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America, volume number 46 of the prestigious magazine McSweeney’s. With his first novel, The Night, he won the 2016 Paris Rive Gauche Prize, the Critics Award in Venezuela and the 2019 Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Prize. Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with sixty-something books to his name. He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Blue Peter Book Award and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among many others. He lives in London, England. Noel Hernández González is a writer and translator. Originally from Spain, he lives in Norwich, England.
Website: https://www.sevenstories.com/
Twitter: @satajoslargos @7StoriesPress
Conversations With Book
Breathe and Count Back from Ten
Author: Natalia Sylvester
Publisher: Harper Collins Publisher
ISBN: 0358536863 / ISBN-13: 978-0358536864
SUMMARY:
In this gorgeously written and authentic novel, Verónica, a Peruvian-American teen with hip dysplasia, auditions to become a mermaid at a Central Florida theme park in the summer before her senior year, all while figuring out her first real boyfriend and how to feel safe in her own body.
Verónica has had many surgeries to manage her disability. The best form of rehabilitation is swimming, so she spends hours in the pool, but not just to strengthen her body.
Her Florida town is home to Mermaid Cove, a kitschy underwater attraction where professional mermaids perform in giant tanks . . . and Verónica wants to audition. But her conservative Peruvian parents would never go for it. And they definitely would never let her be with Alex, her cute new neighbor.
She decides it’s time to seize control of her life, but her plans come crashing down when she learns her parents have been hiding the truth from her—the truth about her own body.
About the Author:
Born in Lima, Peru, Natalia Sylvester is the award-winning author of two novels for adults and young adults. CHASING THE SUN was named the Best Debut Book of 2014 by Latinidad Magazine, and EVERYONE KNOWS YOU GO HOME won an International Latino Book Award and the 2019 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her third novel, RUNNING, was a 2020 Junior Library Guild Selection and a 2021 Rise: A Feminist Book Project List selection. Sylvester’s most recent YA novel, BREATHE AND COUNT BACK FROM TEN, is out now from HarperCollins/Clarion Books. She received a BA in creative writing from the University of Miami and now lives and writes in South Florida.
Website: https://www.nataliasylvester.com/ https://www.harpercollins.com/
Twitter: @NataliaSylv @HarperCollins
Instagram: @nataliasylv @harpercollins
Facebook: @NataliaSylvesterAuthor @HarperCollins
