The Hay Festival Bogotá39 list picks the best writers under 40
Like the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” the Hay Festival Bogotá39 list is announced every ten years and is considered a signal of writers to watch in the decade to come. Other honorees include Valeria Luiselli, Samanta Schweblin, and Emiliano Monge, whose novel The Arid Sky will be published by Restless in 2018. The authors will be showcased in a new Hay Festival anthology, Bogotá39-2017, to be published by OneWorld in the UK.
Read more in Publishing Perspectives.
Fonseca was interviewed about his selection by the New York Times Español
"The beauty of these lists, which are always anarchic, is that they force us to imagine secret connections and networks of feeling. I'm certain that this new Bogotá 39 selection will force us to rethink our writing and configure a constellation of poetic similarities and differences among the selections. Instead of the grandiloquent idea of a literary generation, I'd like to think that the list will create a generational will."
Read More in the New York Times Español and at BBC Mundo.
Recent Praise for Colonel Lágrimas
“There’s something fundamentally unsettling about Carlos Fonseca’s debut novel, Colonel Lágrimas.… Maybe it’s the intriguing silence of the Colonel’s self-exile in the French Pyrenees; the whiteness of the mornings outside his windows; or the over-the-shoulder, ghostly omniscience of the narrator, who steals glances at the Colonel’s project.… I have an inkling the Colonel might not really be crazy at all—if he is, it’s only because of his lunacy that he’s stumbled onto something monumental.”
—Daniel Johnson, Paris Review (staff pick)
“So much of the writing in Carlos Fonseca Suárez’s Colonel Lágrimas was just gorgeous, and Megan McDowell’s translation from the original Spanish managed to keep the beautiful complexity of the language intact.”
—Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews, 2016 Reviewer’s Choice
“Turning [the novel’s] pages, one enters a kind of Zen state, as anecdote follows anecdote, and every word is located precisely in the place that seems right for it. But these are not just jewels moved by pincers on a metal plate. Through its form, Colonel Lágrimas dares to ask about the meaning of activity and the meaning of thinking, and embodies those questions in the structure of the text itself. Each fragment is exquisitely written.… Colonel Lágrimas embarks on… abstract challenges in a way that is both beautiful and analytical.”
—Jessica Sequeira, Numéro Cinq
by Carlos Fonseca
Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
“Beware, reader, in these pages you will experience vertigo, anxiety and joy. You will become a ghostly presence in a Borgesian world, a camera obscura, where mathematics is a secret weapon, and memory the object of an archaeological pursuit. Loosely inspired by the eventful life of the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Fonseca has created a gorgeous opera prima.”
—Valerie Miles, New York Times Book Review
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632061034
Publication date: Oct 4, 2016