The Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue has spent the past five years living in New York, teaching at Columbia University and Princeton and contributing to literary journals like n+1 and The Believer.
He has written six acclaimed books in Spanish, but “Sudden Death” — which earned major literary prizes in Mexico and Spain and comes out Feb. 9 via Riverhead — is his first novel to appear in English. The book is translated by Natasha Wimmer, who has become something of a tastemaker in contemporary Latin American literature following her translations of Roberto Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives” and “2666.” Mr. Enrigue routinely makes historical peculiarities the subject of his fiction, and “Sudden Death” — a postmodern romp through Baroque Europe that begins with a tennis match between Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo — is no exception. The following are edited excerpts from an interview with Mr. Enrigue.
Read full interview here (By Stephen Heyman) Jan.
