Norte

Edmundo Paz Solda´n is a prominent figure of the McOndo generation of South American writers, author of nine novels and winner of many awards, including the Juan Rulfo Premio de Cuento in 1997, and the Premio Nacional de Novela in Bolivia (in 1992 and 2003). Both Achy Obejas and Professor Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, enthusiastically recommended his novel, Norte, which El Pais from Spain has called his best. His fiction is fast-paced, vivid, and grounded in political and economic realities. This novel is daring and risky both in terms of its protagonists--a young serial killer, a graduate student who writes graphic novels, and an artist in a mental institution--and its structure, in which the stories of these three characters, who have immigrated north to the U.S. at different times, gradually come together. The book is almost operatic in the way it blends different sorts of voices. Valerie Miles is an experienced translator, the co-director of Granta en espanol and The New York Review of Books in Spanish. Her recent works include a translation, Because She Never Asked (New Directions) and A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-language Fiction. She teaches translation in Barcelona.