Bargains! PROMOTIONS
Mauro Javier Cardenas grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in economics from Stanford University. Excerpts from his first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, have appeared in Conjunctions, the Antioch Review, Guernica, Witness, and BOMB. His interviews and essays on/with Lszl Krasznahorkai, Javier Maras, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Antnio Lobo Antunes have appeared in Music & Literature, the San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, and the Quarterly Conversation.
Exuberant, cacophonous ... Cardenas dizzyingly leaps from character to character, from street protests to swanky soirees, and from lengthy uninterrupted interior monologues to rapid-fire dialogues and freewheeling satirical radio programs, resulting in extended passages of brilliance. --Publishers Weekly, review *starred* An unhinged novel about three childhood friends contemplating a presidential run against the crooked Ecuadorian president Abdala El Loco Bucaram. This is double-black-diamond high modernism, so do some warm-up stretches before you crack this baby. --Shelf Awareness He's a tremendously skilled storyteller and monologuist; his writing is so exuberant. --Paul Yamazaki In The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas has taken the edifice of arch modernism and suffused it with tender details of a boyhood in Ecuador. The long, unraveling sentences reveal an extraordinarily musical ear. This is a debut that will last. --Karan Mahajan The Revolutionaries Try Again is a daring novel that pits youthful idealism against persistent and inescapable corruption. Mauro Javier Cardenas is an exciting new voice in Latin American literature, and his debut crackles with an exuberance that readers of Valeria Luiselli, Julio Cortazar, and Horacio Castellanos Moya will love. --Stephen Sparks Beware of this writer! The book you're holding bites. If the reader dares enter after this warning, he'll never forget it, and the memory will stay just as sharp as the humor and velocity in the stories themselves. Incisive, forceful, and written in an English that's fiercely subversive, The Revolutionaries Try Again evokes a pair of great Latin American novels: Bolano's The Savage Detectives and Cortazar's Hopscotch. But this book goes even further: it's the novel we've been waiting for, witness to the most recent wave of immigration from Latin America to the US, told through the eyes of a privileged class that forces their conationals out of their countries. It's been ten years since a book this alive, this incandescent, has fallen into my hands. --Carmen Boullosa Irreverent, shape-shifting, and wise, The Revolutionaries Try Again is as relentless in its indictment of political depredation as it is heartfelt in its devotion to the friendships and wild idealisms of youth. This forceful debut novel is a blast of fresh air, and I had a blast reading it. --Justin Taylor, author of Fling What begins as an Ecuadorian political farce in Mauro Javier Cardenas's The Revolutionaries Try Again quickly becomes the most exciting experimental novel in years--a vision so uncompromising in form and sensation that readers will leave sighing, swearing, and returning to page one. --Tony Tulathimutte
