Ornamental

Literature & Fiction

Cárdenas, Juan

United States

Coffee House Press

<p>After a series of failures, a biologist returns to his hometown to live with his grieving mother. But in this gripping crime novel that upends the genre’s conventions, strange events unravel what he thought he knew of his past, his present, and himself.<br />
When a biologist returns to Colombia after fifteen years abroad, he quickly becomes entangled in the trappings of his past and his increasingly bizarre present: the unsolved murder of his brother, a boarding school where girls give birth to strange creatures, a chance encounter with his irrevocably changed first love. A brush with a well-connected acquaintance leads to a biotechnology job offer, and he’s gradually drawn into a web of conspiracy. Ultimately, he may be destined to remain in the city he’d hoped never to see again―in The Devil of the Provinces, nothing is as it seems.</p>

The Devil of the Provinces

Literary

The Beat of an Immigrant Chicano

DU CYGNE

Approaching fantasy, but with particularities that push it beyond the constraints of that genre, Ornamento details the encounter between a scientist and a group of volunteers, guinea pigs for a new recreational drug that solely affects women. After one of them, known only as Number 4, becomes romantically involved with the scientist and his wife, the couple finds their beliefs and assumptions—based in a position of socioeconomic privilege—shaken to the core.

Ornamento (Largo Recorrido) (Spanish Edition)

Editorial Periferica

It’s impossible to deny the impact on Latin American literature of a Sicilian author who, somehow, managed to join Borges with the great French moralists: Leonardo Sciascia. The reading of Sciascia is particularly important in Juan Cárdenas’s latest novel, in which politics, religion, and industry (three quintessentially Sciasian themes) are as important as sex or nature, two themes that Cárdenas tends to favor in this, one of the preeminent Latin American novels of the 21st century.

El diablo de las provincias (Spanish Edition)

After receiving the news of his sister’s death, a man begins an escape that takes him from the congested center of a Latin American city to its outskirts, which the jungle is fighting to dominate. His objective is soon complicated when he and the companions who join him along the way come to witness the upturned lives of a group of survivors of a catastrophe whose only choice is to continue fleeing, advancing, moving forward.

Zumbido (Spanish Edition)

Peregrino transparente (Spanish Edition)

Periférica

Far from the preexisting models that deal with the realities of Latin America with a stark, apocalyptic realism or a trivial celebration of the exotic, this novel is radical support for literature devoted to writing, understood to mean the transformation of the everyday experience and as a reflection on the way in which personal, social, and historical stories are constructed. Through one voice constantly interrupted by many others, it tells the story of a man besieged by the need to reconstruct a vague memory from his childhood, while essential elements of his private life collapse with each passing day. The Strata is a machine created to reveal links between the most intimate personal experiences and political violence, which in the end turns the book into a philosophical exploration of the peculiar forms of desire typical of late capitalism in a society as unequal and contradictory as Colombia’s in the beginning of the 21st century. The conflicts—civil or bloody, private or public—reach a raw and symbolic dimension, making readers think as much as feel and desire.Lejos de los modelos preestablecidos que abordan las realidades de América Latina desde el tremendismo apocalíptico o la banal celebración de lo exótico, esta novela es una apuesta radical por una literatura apegada a la escritura, entendida como la transformación de la experiencia cotidiana y como reflexión sobre la manera en que se construyen los relatos personales, sociales e históricos. A través de una voz intervenida constantemente por muchas otras, cuenta la historia de un hombre asediado por la necesidad de reconstruir un recuerdo impreciso de su infancia, mientras los elementos esenciales de su vida privada se desmoronan con el paso de cada día. Los estratos es una máquina creada para revelar vínculos entre la experiencia personal más íntima y la violencia política, lo que a la postre convierte el libro en una exploración filosófica de las particulares formas del deseo propias del capitalismo tardío en una sociedad tan desigual y contradictoria como la colombiana de comienzos del siglo XXI. Los conflictos—civiles o sangrientos, privados o públicos—alcanzan una dimensión cruda y simbólica, haciendo que el lector piense tanto como sienta y desee.

Los estratos (Largo Recorrido) (Spanish Edition)

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