The Fake Muse - Softcover

Max Besora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 196038533X ISBN 13: 9781960385338

Publisher: Open Letter, 2025

Synopsis

The Fake Muse, Max Besora's follow-up to the wild - and wildly beloved - The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, creates a kaleidoscope of absurd situations that, for even more absurd reasons, end up exploding in uncontrolled violence. A novel full of humour that begins as a collection of short stories but which, little by little, builds into a choral work, made up of a variety of characters and various literary genres, all of which demonstrate Besora's fantastic imagination and skill as a writer. This culminates in an unforgettable scene in which the protagonist of the book turns the tables on the author and calls into question his motives, why he chooses to create particular subjects for his books and, above all, his responsibility for how he treats them. Translated by the award-winning Mara Faye Lethem, Besora's The Fake Muse is a delightful, playful novel in the vein of John Barth and Robert Coover, with a contemporary lens.

About this title

About the Authors

Max Besora has written five novels: Volcano (2011, rewritten and republished 2021), The Marvelous Technique (2014), The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia (2017), The Fake Muse (2020), and His Master's Voice (2022) and one fictional essay on urban music, Trapology (2018).

Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by Jaume Cabré, David Trueba, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron, Marc Pastor and Toni Sala, among others, and shorter fiction by such authors as Juan Marsé, Rodrigo Fresán, Pola Oloixarac, Teresa Colom and Alba Dedeu. Her translation of The Whispering City, by Sara Moliner, recently received an English PEN Award and two of her translations were nominated for the 2016 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She also won the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award for her translation of Max Besora's The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

JOHNNY

 

my name is joan pons but my friends call me johnny dynamite after some porno actor you know how when they give you a nickname like that it sticks with you for life

            i'm thirty-four years old and my zodiac sign is aries i read somewhere that aries are honest but temperamental my favorite color is black and my favorite book is a thousand vampires by the writer kim gonzo

            the other day i went to the movies with my girl rita rico                  it musta been a friday evening like any other friday evening they were showing nosferatu by f.w. murnau with subtitles

            i've seen nosferatu thirty times for real i'm not kidding it's my favorite movie i identify with the atmosphere and the plot and the main character i think the actor max schreck does an incredible job rita wanted to buy popcorn peanut m&ms and cocacola NO i said eat at home or in a restaurant the theater is for watching movies not eating

            the theater was empty except for a couple of teenagers who were making out in one corner obviously they weren't there to see nosferatu         there was an old hobo there who came to take a nap and was already snoring before the coming attractions started as if his life was escaping from his esophagus there is nothing grosser than listening to somebody snoring in a movie theater unless someone comes

            unless someone comes right before the movie starts and SITS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU it's not like there aren't any other empty seats i say to rita and the dude has to sit here what a yobbo and it wasn't just that                      his big balloon head blocked half the screen but also he had a huge bucket of popcorn and he started chewing and slurping cocacola or whatever it was that

            he was slurping can ya believe the noise this pig sitting here is making i say to rita rico but she says shit man chill out güey don't be garrapatero watch the movie and relax and later we'll go hang out and have some dinner and then we'll go out and do some serious bumpin and grindin on the dance floor perrea, perrea come on wey focus on the screen juanito don't freak out she tells me as

            if it wuz that easy that fuckin gross pig keeps on making noise right when the credits are starting and i'm getting more and more nervous and i can't believe i forgot my valiums at home gotdamn there is nothing that gets under my skin more than the sound of a

            mouth frenetically chewing popcorn in fact that shit is much worse than a dying old dude's snoring oh dear nosferatu have pity on all these bastards did you notice? i say to

            my boo after a few minutes i think he's doing it on purpose i say to rita nobody slurps cocacola like that he's doing it on purpose the fucken summabitch

            come on weyyyy simmer down says rita stop it already with your pendejadas it's like something out of a b-movie or a z-movie you're like a little kid... by the way remind me to pack you a lunch for tomorrow k?

            a spasm runs up my spine like a boa constrictor i couldn't stand the lunches rita rico packed for me cuz they were like the ones my mother made me to take to

            school i just couldn't stand those lunches i couldn't stand them i hated having to carry them around all the time those two or three greasy plastic containers it was horrible and now rita rico does the same thing the exact same thing that my moms used to do

            she spends the whole damn day making lunches to put in tupperware rita rico turned into my mother it's a horrible feeling i look into her eyes and i see my mother with that look my mother had when she was about to fill up some tupperware she has the same gleam in her eyes that look like she's about to pack a damn lunch

            i can't stand food i watch the rats on the street eating trash and i want to eat the rats and garbage                     my teeth look like sevillian castanets max schreck the actor who plays nosferatu fills the enormous screen a terrible joke in a monochromatic landscape before my blood-shot eyes and

            i even take a photo of the movie screen to remember his elegant figure and i upload it to snapchat immediately

IMAGE

but between us and the enormous screen was the horrible noises that disgusting guy in front of us was making with his popcorn prolly was the typical obese spoiled brat forty years old and still living with his mommy   one of those losers who've never worked a day in his life and collects star wars action figures

            one of those losers who has every possible allergy known to science because they can't face up to their shitty lives and their mother is so overprotective she treats em like

            retards or embryos in jars filled with uterine liquid and ended up creating some sort of monster who can't do shit but thinks he's got the right to walk around like a little dictator

            overprotected dudes that bug you with conversations so stupid and banal that you want to puke on yourself or run away                    the kind of people the world does not need

            you know the kind of person i'm talking bout right? i say to my boo overpopulation of these maniacal spoiled brats somebody oughta do something don't you think? i say to rita deport them to the antarctic or some far-off desolate cold place so they wise up

            but sooner or later they'd end up coming back so best to just eliminate them once and for all i say to rita órale shut the fuck up bueeeyyyy she says to me she doesn't understand my position but i can't stand another second the fat disgusting spoiled slob making a horrific sound in front of me all i could see was his round head and i hated him and his popfuckingcorn

            i felt like smashing something i wanted to i really wanted to

            suddenly         i got up from my seat and ran out of the theater and ran to the toilets

            i looked in the mirror i was all sweaty and pale when i opened my mouth i saw that two massive fangs were growing in my gums my face had turned super white like the living dead

            i backed up scared

            slowly slowly my body was getting blurry and disappearing from the mirror

            and suddenly i had a terrific desire to bite something something alive

            to sink my teeth into something human

            i was all TERRIBLY VAMPIRIZED

            i ran into the darkness of the theater rita was screamed where you going pendejo? ándale pinche puto no te hagas nalga . . . man don't get all cantiflas on me . . . no seas tan denso carnal you know eso de la movida . . . you know how it is ándale cabrón

            but i walked past my boo without even listening to her and i leapt over the seat and landed in one right in front of ours and i opened my mouth in the direction of

            the neck of that mental retard who was still eating fucken popcorn making a horrible sound       i bit i chewed up the neck of that gross guy sinking my teeth in again and again and without stopping over and over as the schlub had less and less neck and i felt his hot blood in my mouth

            the popcorn went flying and the guy had no ears and barely any face and no neck left tearing off bites of his face was the only option i had in that particular moment because deep down that

            disgusting man was no longer real i mean he wasn't important he was just a shadow in the shadows there was no difference between me and nosferatu and that doesn't mean a thing it means nothing to me i don't mean next to nothing it does not mea

Edition details

• Publisher: Open Letter
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 196038533X
• ISBN 13: 9781960385338
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176