About this Event
Join us for the book launch of Cremation (New Directions, 2021), the masterpiece from one of our most beloved Spanish authors, Rafael Chirbes, translated by Valerie Miles.
Valerie Miles will be in attendance to discuss this amazing novel and its translation process.
Along the Mediterranean coastline of Spain, real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into tourist resorts, nightclubs, and beachfront properties with lavish bars and pools. The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs. Cremation opens with the death of Matías, a paterfamilias who had rejected all of these changes and whose passing sets off a chain reaction, uncovering a past that had been buried for years, and leading those closest to him to question the paths they’ve chosen. In a rich mosaic narrative, filled with a hypnotic chorus of voices, Cremation explores the coked-up champagne fizz of luxurious parties shadowed by underworlds of political corruption, prostitution, and ruthless financial speculation. The novel enters that melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash and captures something essential about our values, our choices, and our all too human mistakes.
Valerie Miles is a publisher, writer, translator and the co–founder of Granta en español. She is known for promoting Spanish and Latin American literature and their translation in the English speaking world, at the same time as bringing American and British authors to Spain and Latin America for the first time, working with main publishing houses on the sector. She is currently the co-director of Granta en español and The New York Review of Books in its Spanish translation. On 2012 she co-curated a Roberto Bolaño at the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. In addition, she is a professor in the post-graduate program for literary translation at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
An overflowing, mesmeric masterpiece about greed from “one of the most remarkable authors on the Spanish scene” (The Guardian)
Like William Faulkner or Francis Bacon, Chirbes stares, clear-eyed, into the abyss, and portrays us as we really are. “Rafael Chirbes is a master of the kind of Spanish literature that shines most brightly in lyrical descriptive passages and powerful metaphors.” —MARA FAYE LETHEM, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Utterly convincing in its psychological details, but also memorable for the beauty of its writing and rhythms.” —COLM TÓIBÍN
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Wild Detectives, 314 West Eighth Street, Dallas, United States
USD 0.00