Spain Arts & Culture + Lost City Books present a reading by Miguel Ángel Hernández, in conversation with Tope Folarin.
About the book:
Translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West
In this mesmerizing psychological novel, a strange job leads a widowed photographer down a rabbit hole where the line between past and present, and the living and the dead blurs.
What is our relationship with the dead? How do we remember them? What dark secrets do our images of them hold? How do we emerge from grief to face the time we have left?
Ten years after the tragic death of her husband, Dolores Ayala, owner of an old photography studio that has run out of clients, receives the most unusual assignment of her career: to take a portrait of a deceased person on the day of his funeral. Accepting it leads her to meet Clemente Artés, an eccentric old man obsessed with recovering the ancient tradition of photographing the dead. Under his guidance, Dolores will explore this forgotten practice, experience the slow time of the daguerreotype, and our need for images to remember those who are no longer there. She will also discover that some of them hold dark secrets that should never be revealed and, above all, that the dead never cease to move and sometimes pounce on the memory of the living.
Miguel Ángel Hernández has written a subtle, dazzling novel about the borders between life and death, about memory and guilt, about the past that stays with us and our constant search for air to breathe.
Miguel Ángel Hernández is a Spanish writer best known for his works of fiction, among them the novels Intento de escapada (2013), which won the Premio Ciudad Alcalá de Narrativa and was translated into five languages, El instante de peligro (2015), which was a finalist for the Premio Herralde de Novela, and El dolor de los demás (2018), which was selected as a book of the year by El País and the New York Times en Español. Hernández teaches art history at the University of Murcia and has authored several books on art and visual culture.
Tope Folarin will moderate a conversation with Miguel.
Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.
SPAIN arts & culture is a program of the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Washington, D.C., aimed at promoting Spanish culture and science in the U.S. through meaningful exchanges between institutions and artists, while fostering strong bilateral relations between our two countries. Among its objectives, the program enhances shared knowledge on the cultural and creative industries and facilitates professional opportunities for artists, drawing on our common Hispanic heritage.
Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. Please contact events@lostcitybookstore.com with questions.
Dato de accesibilidad: Este evento toma lugar en el segundo piso y Lost City Books no tiene ascensor. Favor de contactar events@lostcitybookstore.com con cualquiera duda.