Keynote
A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
Book Title
Season of the Swamp
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- Finalist for the 2024 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction
Body
New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings these immigrants witness as they attempt to shape their future.
With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Yuri Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history.
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings these immigrants witness as they attempt to shape their future.
With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Yuri Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history.
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About the Author
Credit: Tori Bush
Praise
- “Virtuosic. . . . The Juárez that Herrera conjures with his muscular prose — translated with bravura by Lisa Dillman . . . is above all a pair of eyes and ears. He’s an observer alive to the world, endowed with the foreigner’s curiosity and the subaltern’s ironic skepticism.”—Nicolás Medina Mora, The New York Times Book Review
- “Richly imagined, profusely written.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
- “Mesmerizing . . . as glorious and messy as the best New Orleans gumbo. . . . It’s a triumph.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
- “Told in Herrera’s typically sparkling, form-exploding language, this one is screaming ‘modern epic.’”—Brittany Allen, Literary Hub
