{"title":"Carlos Fonseca","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the thought-provoking narratives of Carlos Fonseca, where philosophy meets fiction. Explore themes of identity, memory, and the human condition in his critically acclaimed novels – a rewarding read for discerning minds.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"austral-book-carlos-fonseca-9781529422603","title":"Austral","description":"\"A multilayered exploration of ideas . . . [A] masterly voyage of discovery\" New York Times  \"Fonseca's most ambitious, most complex and most accomplished novel to date\" JAVIER CERCAS  \"An exceptional and intricate novel of depth, insight and understanding\" Irish Times  \"A tender and thoughtful exploration of the painful irony of being alive\" KATHARINA VOLCKMER  \"A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative\" GUY GUNARATNE  \"Expansive and thought-provoking\" Guardian  A dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild.  In this innovative novel three losses and three quests are pursued. English writer Aliza Abravanel tries, in a battle with aphasia, to finish her book. A last indigenous speaker is confronted with the fading of his culture and language while an anthropologist struggles to prevent it. And through the construction of an esoteric theatre of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1970s and '80s seeks to recover the memories lost after the traumas of war. And behind these three threads lies the narrator's own story: Julio, a disillusioned university professor, must try to understand and complete his friend Aliza's novel, and come to terms with a past he shared with her but has blanked for thirty years.  From the Guatemalan wilderness to the high Peruvian Amazon, passing through Nueva Germania, the anti-Semitic commune founded in Paraguay by Nietzsche's sister, Austral takes us on a long journey south, following a trail of ecological and cultural destruction to excavate contemporary xenophobia.  \"Reminiscent of the best of Bolaño, Borges and Calvino\" Guardian  Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49578374463761,"sku":"GOR013477541","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49582630764817,"sku":"GOR013159403","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49739857625361,"sku":"NGR9781529422603","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53395846627601,"sku":"GOR014901988","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1529422604.jpg?v=1751441966"},{"product_id":"austral-book-carlos-fonseca-9781529422610","title":"Austral","description":"\"A tender and thoughtful exploration of the painful irony of being alive and our attempts to make sense of the past as well as the present\" KATHARINA VOLCKMER, author of The Appointment  \"A reflection on identity, rootlessness and violence - Fonseca's most ambitious, most complex and most accomplished novel to date\" JAVIER CERCAS, author of Soldiers of Salamis  \"A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative alongside a meditation on memory, mystery and vanishing. Sebaldian in its turns, Austral is a novel of profound questions\" GUY GUNARATNE, author of Mister, Mister  A dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild.  In this innovative novel three losses and three quests are pursued. English writer Aliza Abravanel tries, in a battle with aphasia, to finish her book. A last indigenous speaker is confronted with the fading of his culture and language while an anthropologist struggles to prevent it. And through the construction of an esoteric theatre of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1970s and '80s seeks to recover the memories lost after the traumas of war. And behind these three threads lies the narrator's own story: Julio, a disillusioned university professor, must try to understand and complete his friend Aliza's novel, and come to terms with a past he shared with her but has blanked for thirty years.  From the Guatemalan wilderness to the high Peruvian Amazon, passing through Nueva Germania, the anti-Semitic commune founded in Paraguay by Nietzsche's sister, Austral takes us on a long journey south, following a trail of ecological and cultural destruction to excavate contemporary xenophobia.  \"Reminiscent of the best of Bolaño, Borges and Calvino\" Guardian  Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49739880726801,"sku":"NGR9781529422610","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50939185692945,"sku":"GOR014134876","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52121469583633,"sku":"NLS9781529422610","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52728592204049,"sku":"GOR014602649","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52933064130833,"sku":"GOR014660022","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1529422612.jpg?v=1751406489"},{"product_id":"austral-book-carlos-fonseca-9780374606657","title":"Austral","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrom Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eJulio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. \u003ci\u003eAustral\u003c\/i\u003e tracks Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A story of mourning and return--to one's native country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself--Carlos Fonseca's \u003ci\u003eAustral\u003c\/i\u003e interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50349121536273,"sku":"CIN037460665XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50349122814225,"sku":"CIN037460665XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52103287374097,"sku":"CIN037460665XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52111386542353,"sku":"NIN9780374606657","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/037460665X.jpg?v=1751391044"},{"product_id":"coronel-lagrimas-book-carlos-fonseca-9788433997913","title":"Coronel Lagrimas","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eBeware, reader, in these pages you will experience vertigo, anxiety and joy. You will become a ghostly presence in a Borgesian world, a camera obscura, where mathematics is a secret weapon, and memory the object of an archaeological pursuit. Loosely inspired by the eventful life of the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Fonseca has created a gorgeous opera prima. --Valerie Miles, \u003ci\u003eThe \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eHoled away in a cabin in the Pyrenees, the world-famous and enigmatic mathematician Alexander Grothendieck is working furiously on a final project. But what exactly \u003ci\u003eis\u003c\/i\u003e this monumental, mysterious undertaking? Why did this man, one of the greatest geniuses of the century, a politically militant man himself, suddenly decide to abandon politics and society altogether? As the reader pursues the answer to these questions, two layered narratives emerge. One is a series of unforgettable characters that have transfixed the mathematician's imagination: Chana Abramov, a woman obsessed with painting the same Mexican volcano a thousand times, Vladimir Vostokov, an anarchist in battle with technological modernity, and Maximiliano Cienfuegos, a simple man who will nonetheless become the symbol for the Colonel's as well as Europe's restless political conscience. The other is the protagonist's life story: a picaresque journey that traverses the 20th century: from the Russia of the October Revolution to the Mexico of the anarchic 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam, all the way back to France and from there to the Caribbean islands. Out of this Borgesian web emerges a tragicomic allegory for the political arch of the past century, one that began addicted to political action and ended up hooked on big data. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eLoosely based on the fascinating life story of the eccentric mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, \u003ci\u003eColonel L grimas\u003c\/i\u003e is a world-spanning tour de force of history, politics, literature, mathematics, and philosophy that wears its learning lightly, forming an appealingly human story of the forces that have created the modern world. ","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50406714769681,"sku":"CIN8433997912G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/8433997912.jpg?v=1751222760"},{"product_id":"natural-history-book-carlos-fonseca-9780374216306","title":"Natural History","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697863725329,"sku":"NGR9780374216306","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50778768212241,"sku":"CIN0374216304VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51423726108945,"sku":"CIN0374216304G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374216304.jpg?v=1750878507"},{"product_id":"natural-history-book-carlos-fonseca-9781250798541","title":"Natural History","description":"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. 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A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.\u003c\/p\u003e y survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.y survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.y survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51663841034513,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51663841165585,"sku":"NIN9781250335746","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1250335744.jpg?v=1751017706"},{"product_id":"literature-of-catastrophe-book-carlos-fonseca-9781501370700","title":"The Literature of Catastrophe","description":"This book investigates how nature and history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, The Literature of Catastrophe reimagines the emergence of the modern Latin American nation-states beyond the scope of the harmonious “foundational fictions” that marked the emergence of the nation as an organic community. Through a study of philosophical, literary and artistic representations of three catastrophic figures – earthquakes, volcanoes and epidemics – this book provides a critical model through which to refute these state-sponsored “happy narratives,” proposing instead that the emergence of the modern state in Latin America was indeed a violent event whose aftershocks are still felt today.   Engaging a variety of sources and protagonists, from Simón Bolívar’s manifestoes to Cesar Aira’s use of landscape in his novels, from the revolutionary role mosquitoes had within the Haitian Revolution to the role AIDS played in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas’ posthumous novel, Carlos Fonseca offers an original retelling of this foundational moment, recounting how history has become a site where the modern division between nature and culture collapses.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52334560313617,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52334560805137,"sku":"NLS9781501370700","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781501370700.jpg?v=1758157243"},{"product_id":"museo-animal-book-carlos-fonseca-9788433998408","title":"Museo Animal","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53483663884561,"sku":"CIN8433998404VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9788433998408.jpg?v=1777608034"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-carlos-fonseca.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}