Mantra
$15.95
April 20, 2024
novel | pb | 520 pgs.
6" x 9"
978-1-960385-64-2
Winner of the 2018 Best Translated Book Award
Winner of the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize, USA & Canada
What does a nostalgic brain tumor, a specter obsessed with masked wrestlers, and a hypothetical android searching for a missing creator through a world in ruins have in common?
“Mantra is a kaleidoscopic novel, shot through with fierce, occasionally over-the-top humor, written in a prose of rare precision that allows itself to oscillate between anthropological document and the delirium of late nights in a city—Mexico City—that superimposes itself on the subterranean cities beneath it like a snake swallowing itself . . . The novel, or so it appears (and I say appears because everything in this novel can come to seem only apparent, though its parts are assembled with mathematical exactitude), is divided into three long chapters. . . Among the multiple plotlines that crisscross like lightning bolts is the story of Joan Vollmer, killed in Mexico City while playing William Tell with her husband, William Burroughs; and the story of the Mexican masked wrestlers and the nouvelle vague film that one of them wants to make in France; and the story of LID, the international language of the dead; and the story of Mexican monsters and Mexican pornography; and the story of the female rock group Anorexia & The Skinnies; and the story of Martín Mantra as a millenarian and media-savvy guerrilla.
“Mantra is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in recent years. It made me laugh more than any other book, and it seemed more virtuous and at the same time more roguish.”—Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden
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About the Author:
Rodrigo Fresán (Buenos Aires, 1963) is the author of seventeen works of fiction, including Kensington Gardens, The Bottom of the Sky, The Invented Part, The Dreamed Part, The Remembered Part, and Melvill, all of which are available in English. He has translated and edited or annotated books by John Cheever, Denis Johnson, and Carson McCullers, and written prologues for and reviews of numerous North American writers. The Invented Part won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction in 2018 and his most recent novel to appear in English, Melvill, won The Republic of Consciousness Prize, The Big Other Book Award for Translation, and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation and the National Translation Award in 2025. In 2018, Fresán was awarded the Prix Roger Callois by the French government for his entire body of work.
Will Vanderhyden has translated works by Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, Fernanda García Lao, Andrés Felipe Solano, Laura Fernández, and Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, among others. His translations and writing have appeared in journals like Granta, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Future Tense, Southwest Review, and Bomb Magazine. He has received two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (2016 and 2023) and a residency fellowship from Lannan Foundation (2015). His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award and his translation of Fresán’s Melvill (published in 2024) was a finalist for the National Translation Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Big Other Book Award. His translation of Andrés Felipe Solano’s Gloria was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize.
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Praise for Rodrigo Fresán:
"A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."—Jonathan Lethem
"Rodrigo Fresán is the new star of Latin American literature. . . . There is darkness in him, but it harbors light within it because his prose—aimed at bygone readers—is brilliant."—Enrique Vila-Matas
"I've read few novels this exciting in recent years. <i>Mantra</i> is the novel I've laughed with the most, the one that has seemed the most virtuosic and at the same time the most disruptive."—Roberto Bolaño
"Rodrigo Fresán is a marvelous writer, a direct descendant of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, but with his own voice and of his own time, with a fertile imagination, daring and gifted with a vision as entertaining as it is profound."—John Banville
"With pop culture cornered by the forces of screen culture, says Fresán (knowing the risk to his profile of 'pop writer,' even coming out himself to discuss it), there's nothing left but to be classic. That's the only way to keep on writing."—Alan Pauls
