The year wrapped on a high note for Restless Books, with year-end accolades from major media outlets ranging from The Wall Street Journal to NPR to VICE for books including György Spiró's Captivity, Alejandro Jodorowsky's Where the Bird Sings Best, and Yoss's A Planet for Rent: all excellent choices for a new year of reading! Read on for review excerpts and links.

The Wall Street Journal: The Best Books of 2015

“Captivity is a complex and fast-paced tale of Jewish life in the early first century, a sort of sword-and-sandals saga as reimagined by Henry Roth. The narrative follows Uri from Rome to Jerusalem and back, from prospectless dreamer to political operative to pogrom survivor—who along the way also happens to dine with Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate and get thrown into a cell with a certain Galilean rabble-rouser. Hungarian György Spiró’s deft combination of philosophical inquiry and page-turning brio should overcome that oft-mentioned American timidity toward books in translation.”

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NPR: The Best Books of 2015

“Where the Bird Sings Best is Alejandro Jodorowsky's brilliant, mad and unpredictable semi-autobiographical novel. Translated by Alfred MacAdam, this multigenerational chronicle introduces a host of memorable characters, from a dwarf prostitute and a floating ghost-Rabbi to a lion tamer who eats raw meat and teaches his beasts to jump through flaming hoops. Fantastical elements aside, Where the Bird Sings Best is a fiercely original immigration tale that culminates in the author's birth in Chile in 1929 — a complicated time in that nation's history. Combine that with poetry, tarot and Jewish mysticism and you have a genius's surreal vision brought to life.”

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NPR: The Best Books of 2015

“A Planet for Rent is the English-language debut of Yoss, one of Cuba's most lauded writers of science fiction. Translated by David Frye, these linked stories craft a picture of a dystopian future: Aliens called xenoids have invaded planet Earth, and people are looking to flee the economically and socially bankrupt remains of human civilization. Yoss' smart and entertaining novel tackles themes like prostitution, immigration and political corruption. Ultimately, it serves as an empathetic yet impassioned metaphor for modern-day Cuba, where the struggle for power has complicated every facet of society.”

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VICE: 2015 Was the Year the Literary Versus Genre War Ended

"This hilarious and imaginative novel by Cuba's premiere science-fiction writer gets my vote for most overlooked novel of the year. Yoss's book imagines a world where Earth is run as a tourist destination by capitalist aliens who have little regard for the planet or its inhabitants. A Planet for Rent is a perfect SF satire for our era of massive inequality and seemingly unchecked environmental destruction."

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Updated September 10, 2015

Critics and artists alike are singing the praises of legendary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's latest masterpiece, Where the Bird Sings Best. The first novel in English translation by the polymathic master of cinema, theater, comics, shamanism, and the Tarot, Where the Bird Sings Best is emerging as a modern classic of Latin-American literature. Critics call it "frightening, outrageous, hilarious, touching," "surreal, mystical, and grotesque," "gloriously readable," "deliciously far-fetched," "wildly inventive," and "electrifying." Read on for more great quotes, reviews, and highlights below.

Where the Bird Sings Best

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam

“No one alive today, anywhere, has been able to demonstrate the sheer possibilities of artistic invention—and in so many disciplines—as powerfully as Alejandro Jodorowsky.… His new semi-autobiographical novel Where the Bird Sings Best is his magnum opus, a fantastical something that in many ways mirrors the author himself: It is brilliant, mad, unpredictable.”

—NPR, Best Books of 2015

"One of the most inspiring artists of our time.... A prophet of creativity."

—Kanye West

Paperback • ISBN: 9781632060952
Hardcover • ISBN: 9781632060280
Publication date: Mar 31, 2015

Praise and Highlights

NPR Books: His Magnum Opus—Brilliant, Mad, Unpredictable

"No one alive today, anywhere, has been able to demonstrate the sheer possibilities of artistic invention — and in so many disciplines — as powerfully as Alejandro Jodorowsky.… His new semi-autobiographical novel, Where the Bird Sings Best, translated by Alfred MacAdam, is his magnum opus, a fantastical something that in many ways mirrors the author himself: It is brilliant, mad, unpredictable.… It's not difficult to see why Where the Bird Sings Best has been compared to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. But Jodorowsky's saga stands firmly on its own.... [An] absurd and glorious carnival." —NPR Books

Kanye West: Jodorowsky is One of the Most Inspiring Artists of Our Time

“Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the most inspiring artists of our time. His bravery, fearlessness and relentless innovation is a reminder of true creativity in a world full of people who hold back their true thoughts out of fear and corporate reasons. I would like to take the opportunity to thank him for inspiring a generation of brave new thinkers. I watched “Holy Mountain” on repeat while working on “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” His sensibilities drove me to make my most progressive work to that date. Simply put, Jodorowsky is a prophet of creativity. For those who know, the mere mention of his name commands respect, just as it sends chills up the spines of weak minded, fake creative, pieces of dog crap.” —Kanye West, quoted in Bleeding Cool

LA Review of Books: Wildly Inventive—Jodorowsky’s Masterpiece

“All Jodorowsky’s work in his films—and in Where the Bird Sings Best—involves the transformation of violent acts into images of often stunning beauty. He is the archetype of “the wounded healer,” the artist-analyst driven by a need to repair his own psychic scars — that is to say, to teach by example, becoming the physician who begins by healing himself.… Wildly inventive.… Jodorowsky’s masterpiece.… As the drama unfolds, the reader’s response veers from incredulity to awe, from doubt to delight.… The momentum holds for the length of the novel as a cavalcade of outsized characters careen across the page in a frenzy that seems for once an adequate and just representation of the living fury that is history.… The images possess an extreme yet striking beauty.… It’s hard not to be moved.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

Barnes & Noble Review: Electrifying

“Sober, dressed, and with all the lights on, I ripped through Where the Bird Sings Best—the first of Jodorowsky’s many novels to appear in English translation—in just a few enraptured days. The trick is to eschew caricature and give yourself over to the experience, at which point the wondrous strange takes over. The mind—and, god help me, the spirit—finds itself traveling in realms it could not have otherwise explored, or even dreamed exist.… Where the Bird Sings Best is electrifying... deeply invested in human emotion, and downright reverent of human bodies, in ecstasy as well as in suffering, in perfection as well as in deformation.” —Barnes & Noble Review

VICE: An Excerpt with Original Artwork by Eko

"Their father, my great-grandfather, had been married to three women and was a widower three times. All his wives died giving birth the first time, and the children in turn never lasted more than three days in the cradle. According to the old gossips, Death was in love with him and out of jealousy snatched away the wives and their fruit." —Excerpt in VICE

Shelf Awareness: A Superb Novelist

“[Jodorowsky is] a superb novelist.… [Where the Bird Sings Best is] gloriously readable... deliciously far-fetched.… One outrageous set piece follows another with an exhilarating density of imagination as Jodorowsky juggles tale within tale with Arabian Nights agility.… Exuberant, unrelentingly creative in its folkloric style of heightened reality, the book serves as one gigantic prequel to 2013's The Dance of Reality, his first film in 23 years and a visually dazzling masterpiece in which Jodorowsky re-creates his childhood with his parents. A master of both film and fiction, he expertly harnesses boldly surreal images to capture the gorgeous, brutal essence of life.” —Shelf Awareness

Jazz legend John Zorn: Frightening, Hilarious, Outrageous, Touching

"Jodorowsky is today’s true Renaissance man—a master of many mediums that all point directly towards a towering and imaginative vision replete with profound insights into the real by way of the surreal. The stories told in Where the Bird Sings Best contain deep moral lessons, giving his mythic immigration story the feel of a modern day Sefer-ha-Aggadah—the classic collection of Jewish folk tales drawn from the Mishnah, Midrash, and Talmud. This long awaited and brilliantly evocative translation is a must read—frightening, hilarious, outrageous, touching, and (as is always with Jodorowsky’s work) filled with a deep core of mystic truth." —John Zorn

Publishers Weekly: A Raucous Carnival of the Mystical and Grotesque

“This epic family saga, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in structure and breadth, reads at a breakneck pace. Though ostensibly a novelization of the author's own family history, it is a raucous carnival of the surreal, mystical, and grotesque.... It weaves together Jewish philosophy, passion, humor, Tarot, ballet, circuses, natural disasters, spectacular suicides, lion tamers, knife throwers, Catholic devotion, farmers, betrayals, prostitutes, leftist politics, political violence, and the ghost of a wise rabbi who follows the family from the Old World to the New.” —Publishers Weekly

Events

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Mar 7, 2018

Leonora and Alejandro: A Play Inspired by Jodorowsky's 'Where the Bird Sings Best'

Mar 7, 2018

This month, Double Edge Theatre presents "Leonora and Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro", a debut performance in the theatre's Latin American Cycle. Inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky's novel, Where the Bird Sings Best, Leonora and Alejandro imagines a conversation between the author and late British-born Mexican artist and founding member of Mexico's Women's Liberation Movement, Leonora Carrington.

Mar 7, 2018