Join us for a reading by Yuri Herrera, author of Season of the Swamp, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman.
About the book:
New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.
Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.
“The always thrilling and always remarkable Yuri Herrera has outdone himself here: reading Season of the Swamp is like being thrown into deep water only to open your eyes and find a haunting and haunted world, one full of magic and beauty, exiles and outsiders, longing and song. I didn’t want to surface—here I am still, in its great, brilliant light.”—Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey
About the author:
Born in Actopan, Mexico, Yuri Herrera is the author of Season of the Swamp and three other novels, including Signs Preceding the End of the World, as well as the collection Ten Planets, which was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.
About the translator:
Lisa Dillman lives in Decatur, Georgia, where she translates Spanish-language fiction and teaches at Emory University. Her recent translations include National Book Award finalist Abyss by Pilar Quintana and Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera.
Lily Meyer will join Yuri Herrera for a conversation following the reading.
Lily Meyer is a translator, critic, and author of the novel Short War. A contributing writer at the Atlantic, her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso's story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians.
This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator.