Natural History (First Edition)

Fonseca, Carlos (author); Megan McDowell (translation)

ISBN 10: 0374216304 / ISBN 13: 9780374216306

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2020

About this Item

FSG, New York, 2020. First edition. First printing (with full number line including 1). Hardbound. Very Fine in a very fine jacket. A clean tight unread copy. Original publisher's price intact on front jacket flap ($27.00). Comes with archival-quality mylar jacket protector. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. A complex, multilayered novel blending art, memory, and myth, praised by Kirkus as "an elegant meditation on inconstancy and hiding.".

Seller Inventory # Fiction-F-2022-02

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Natural History (First Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374216304
• ISBN 13: 9780374216306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Spanish Literature

About this title

Synopsis

Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator's fascination with the hidden forms of the animal kingdom - with camouflage and subterfuge - and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the form of which itself remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the death of the designer, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues to the true story of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungle. On the way, he discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion: an aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, who creates models of ruined cities; a former model turned conceptual artist - and a defendant in a trial over the very nature and purpose of art; a young indigenous boy who has received a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, as the curator realises, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of obsession. Natural History is the portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, between tragedy and farce. A defiantly contemporary and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.

About the Author

Carlos Fonseca was born in San José, Costa Rica, and spent half of his childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico. In 2016, he was named one of the twenty best Latin American writers born in the 1980s at the Guadalajara Book Fair, and in 2017 he was included in the Bogotá39 list of the best Latin American writers under forty. In 2018, he won the National Prize for Literature in Costa Rica, for his book of essays La Lucidez del Miope. He teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge, and lives in London. Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator from Kentucky. Her work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Gonzalo Torné, Lina Meruane, and Diego Zuñiga. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among others. Her translation of Zambra's novel Ways of Going Home won the 2013 PEN Award for Writing in Translation. She lives in Santiago, Chile.