Join Behind the Book in a night of mind-bending, wholly original fiction tackling ideas big and small—empire, history, art, fidelity, family, love, and second chances – with brilliance, humor, and a streak of fun.

Álvaro Enrigue’s prize-winning masterpiece, Sudden Death, is a kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.  The first of the author’s five novels translated into English, Sudden Death was awarded the prestigious Herralde Prize in Spain, the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico, and the Barcelona Prize for Fiction, and has been translated into many languages.  Álvaro was a Cullman Center Fellow and a Fellow at the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies.  He has taught at New York University, Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Columbia University.  His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The White Review, n+1, London Review of Books, and El País, among others.  He was born in Mexico and lives in New York City.

“Sudden Death is the best kind of puzzle, its elements so esoteric and wildly funny that readers will race through the book, wondering how Álvaro Enrigue will be able to pull a novel out of such an astonishing ball of string.  But Enrigue absolutely does; and with brilliance and clarity and emotional warmth all the more powerful for its surreptitiousness.” 
– Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies

“[A] novel of revolution in the spatial and historical sense of the word . . . . And structurally, Sudden Death isn’t normative: a short screenplay and the author’s emails are interspersed with short entries from obscure sporting dictionaries and excerpts from humanist classics . . . . Enrigue muses on the nature of the novel and his intentions in writing Sudden Death as easily as he holds a candle to the obscure maneuvers of the powerful.  And he has a poet’s ear, beautifully attended to by Natasha Wimmer’s translation . . . . Sudden Death shows us that games are never merely games, because no game is played without consequences.” 
– Los Angeles Times

Rachel Cantor’s whip-smart, comical second novel, Good on Paper, uses the art and act of translation to refract larger questions about family bonds, storytelling, identity, and second chances.  Good on Paper follows single mom Shira Greene, a translator given a second chance at life and love when she lands a dream project from a Nobel-winning poet, Romei, only to discover that the assignment may in fact be impossible to translate.  Rachel’s first novel was the widely acclaimed A Highly Unlikely Scenario, and her short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, The Kenyon Review, and Volume 1 Brooklyn, among other publications.  She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and elsewhere, and has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Wesleyan writing conferences.  Raised in Rome and Connecticut, she now lives in Brooklyn.

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