"The things people inscribe on tombstones, even if only with their breath--erasing those things is what the Redeemer's there for."

"In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the kingdom to its core"--Page 4 of cover.

A dizzying novel of deception and metempsychosis by the author of the National Book Award finalist Far North Whatever this is, it started when Nicholas Slopen came back from the dead. In a locked ward of a notorious psychiatric hospital sits a man who insists that he is Dr. Nicholas Slopen, failed husband and impoverished Samuel Johnson scholar. Slopen has been dead for months, yet nothing can make this man change his story. What begins as a tale of apparent forgery involving unknown letters by the great Dr. Johnson grows to encompass a conspiracy between a Silicon Valley mogul and his Russian allies to exploit the darkest secret of Soviet technology: the Malevin Procedure. Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.

Two astonishing novellas, by ‘Mexico’s greatest novelist’, in one volume. Hilarious and horrifying, Yuri Herrera’s The Transmigration of Bodies is a gritty, feverish novella, written in dazzling prose that is both bawdy and poetic. A plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the city’s underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage. Lust and crime and a lack of condoms all feature in this brilliant novella about living in a city filled with the dead, and where no one can distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. A response to the violence of contemporary Mexico, with echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Roberto Bolaño and Raymond Chandler, The Transmigration of Bodies is a noir tragedy and a tribute to those bodies—loved, sanctified and defiled—that violent crime has touched. Signs Preceding the End of the World is a masterpiece, haunting and arresting, spare and poetic, a condensed epic about immigration. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages—one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

Slackers meets Savage Detectives in this polyphonic ode to the pleasures of not measuring up.

Is time travel real? Doctor Petronella sage is determined to find out. So is Justin Bremer, the young scholar in the far future tasked with reviewing Dr. Sage’s timeline. Repeatedly electrocuting herself in order to fling her consciousness through time and space, Petra discovers that death is no barrier to science.

International Latino Book Award Winner Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner Kirkus Prize Finalist Neustadt International Prize Finalist Balcones Fiction Prize Finalist PEN Translation Prize Longlist “A feat of literary acrobatics.” —New York Review of Books In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous narrator travels to Poland, Italy, the U.S., and the Guatemalan countryside in search of secrets he can barely name. He follows memory’s strands back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to the contradictory, forbidden stories of his father’s Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family, specifically surrounding the long-ago childhood death by drowning of his uncle Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South. Mourning is a subtle and stirring reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and loss. Eduardo Halfon moved from Guatemala to the United States at the age of ten and attended school in South Florida and North Carolina. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Roger Caillois Prize, José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel, and Guatemalan National Prize in Literature, he is the author of two previous novels published in English: The Polish Boxer, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and Monastery, longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.