From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator’s fascination with the secrets of the animal kingdom—with camouflage and subterfuge—and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the designer’s death, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues about the true history of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles. As he follows this trail, the curator discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion. An aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed. Natural History is a portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, tragedy and farce. An urgent and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.

The German academic and writer W. G. Sebald made an astounding ascent into the canon of world literature. In this volume, leading experts from both the English- and the German-speaking worlds explore his celebrated prose works published in the short span from 1996 to his premature death in 2001. Special attention is paid to Sebald's unpublished texts and books awaiting translation into English. The volume – illustrated with many unpublished archive images – scrutinizes the dual nature of Sebald's life and work, located between Germany and England, academic and literary writing, vilification and idolization. Through nearly forty essays on a broad range of topics, W. G. Sebald in Context achieves a revision of our understanding of Sebald, defying many clichés about him. Particular attention is paid to the manifold ways in which Sebald's writings exerted a legacy far beyond literature, especially in the areas of art, cinema, and popular music.

Why do people choose to play with ideas considered antiquated? Why do they elect to act in non-productive ways? Perhaps the question can be asked in reverse: What comes to mind when we think of technology? That which is practical, efficient, invisible, fast, optimistic, constantly updated. So how can one explain the search for the opposite, that which is useless, inefficient, physically present, slow, dystopian, obsolete and governed by chance? The matter of what motivates the search for ‘antiquated’ forms strikes deep into the heart of value. Are people simply following trends? Are they idiots? Are they sentimental? Are they artists? Are they interested in kitsch? Are they uninformed? Are they poets? Other Paradises is a collection of essays exploring imaginative responses to science and technology, and is about people who choose to build ‘other paradises’, fully conscious of the alternative they offer to the dominant paradigm of technological progress.

Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2 showcases the work of twenty-five of the most exciting young writers in the Spanish speaking world, chosen by judges Chloe Aridjis, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Fresn, Aurelio Major, Gaby Wood and guest editor Valerie Miles. Granta 155 is published simultaneously with Granta en Espaol 23: Los Mejores Narradores Jvenes en Espaol 2, in Spain and in the US. Andrea Abreu (Spain) trans. Julia Sanches Jos Adiak Montoya (Nicaragua) trans. Samantha Schnee David Aliaga (Spain) trans. Daniel Hahn Carlos Manuel lvarez (Cuba) trans. Frank Wynne Jos Ardila (Colombia) trans. Lindsay Griffiths and Adrin Izquierdo Gonzalo Baz (Uruguay) trans. Christina MacSweeney Miluska Benavides (Peru) trans. Katherine Silver Martn Felipe Castagnet (Argentina) trans. Frances Riddle Andrea Chapela (Mexico) trans. Kelsi Vanada Camila Fabbri (Argentina) trans. Jennifer Croft Paulina Flores (Mexico) trans. Megan McDowell Carlos Fonseca (Costa Rica/Puerto Rico) trans. Megan McDowell Mateo Garca Elizondo (Mexico) trans. Robin Myers Aura Garca-Junco (Mexico) trans. Lizzie Davis Munir Hachemi (Spain) trans. Nick Caistor Dainerys Machado Vento (Cuba) trans. Will Vanderhyden Estanislao Medina Huesca (Equatorial Guinea) trans. Mara Faye Lethem Cristina Morales (Spain) trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn Alejandro Morelln (Spain) trans. Esther Allen Michel Nieva (Argentina) trans. Natasha Wimmer Mnica Ojeda (Ecuador) trans. Sarah Booker Eudris Planche Savn (Cuba) trans. Margaret Jull Costa Irene Reyes-Noguerol (Spain) trans. Lucy Greaves Aniela Rodrguez (Mexico) trans. Sophie Hughes Diego Ziga (Chile) trans. Megan McDowell

"One dizzying vortex, combining colonial history, generational delusions and psychedelic drug trips. . . . An eerily familiar vision of American madness and decay." —The New York Times Book Review From award-winning novelist Argentine Betina González, American Delirium is a dizzying, luminous English-language debut about an American town overrun by a mysterious hallucinogen and the collision of three unexpected characters through the mayhem. In a small Midwestern city, the deer population starts attacking people. So Beryl, a feisty senior and ex-hippie with a troubled past, decides to take matters into her own hands, training a squad of fellow retirees to hunt the animals down and to prove to society they’re capable of more than playing bingo. At the same time, a group of protesters decides to abandon the “system” and live in the woods, leaving behind the demands of modern life—including their children. Nine-year-old Berenice never thought her mother would join the dropouts, but she’s been gone for several days, leaving only a few clues about her past for Berenice to piece together. Vik, a taxidermist at the natural history museum and an immigrant from the Caribbean, is beginning to see the connections among the dropouts, the deer, and the discord. He’s not normally the type to speak up, but when he finds a woman living in his closet, he’s forced to get involved. Each of these engrossing characters holds a key to the city’s unraveling—despite living on the margins of society—and just as their lives start to spin out of control, they rescue one another in surprising ways.

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known. Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio’s trip from Aliza’s home in an Argentine artists’ colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. A story of mourning and return—to one’s native country, to one’s darkest memories, to oneself—Carlos Fonseca’s Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.