The Forgery

by Ave Barrera, Ellen Jones (Translator), Robin Myers (Translator)

Overview

An artist races to finish his forgery of a masterpiece while held captive in surreal, menacing splendor.

José Federico Burgos is a failed painter turned forger trapped in surreal, an architectural masterpiece hidden behind high walls, an impish vagabond, and some very resourceful, very intimidating twins—Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragán, traversing late 20th Century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th Century picaresque.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913867157
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	07/26/2022
Pages:	173
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ave Barrera (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1980) holds a Bachelor in Hispanic Literature from the University of Guadalajara and for several years she worked as an editor in Oaxaca. Ave has been awarded fellowships from the Fundación Carolina for a training course on publishing at the Complutense University of Madrid and the Young Creators Grant for Novel (2010 and 2014) from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA). Ave has worked as copywriter for e-media and once as a ghostwriter. She also writes short stories and just published the illustrated children book Una noche en el laberinto (A Night in a Labyrinth, Edebé 2014). She was recipient of the Sergio Galindo Award from the Veracruz Universitywith her first novel Puertas demasiado pequeñas (The Forgery). She currently lives in Mexico City and is writing a new novel:Tratado de la vida marina (A Treatise of Marine Life) with the support of FONCA. Her latest novel was published in 2019 in Mexico and Spain under the title Restauración (Restoration).

Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and literary translator from Spanish. Her recent and forthcoming translations include The Remains by Margo Glantz (shortlisted for the Warwick Prize of Women in Translation), Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez, The Forgery by Ave Barrera (co-translated with Robin Myers), and Nancy by Bruno Lloret. Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia UniversityPress (2022).

Robin Myers is a New York-born poet and translator. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming from the_Kenyon Review_ , the_Harvard Review_ , Two Lines, The Offing,Journal, Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Inventory . In 2009, she was named a fellow of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA); in 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Banff Literary Translation Centre (BILTC); and in 2017, and she was selected to participate in the feminist translation colloquium A-Fest. Recent book-length translations include Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel, In Vitro by Isabel Zapata and Bariloche by Andrés Neuman.

Editorial Reviews

"Ave Barrera eases us into this microcosmos as strange and shocking as it is true, constructing powerful atmospheres imbued with very varied sensations, ranging from dreamlike hallucinations to terror, horror and beauty." —El País

"We must pay serious attention to the work of Ave Barrera." —Cristina Rivera Garza, author of NO ONE WILL SEE ME CRY

"The plot flows in an intelligent and audacious way: It surprises by the simplicity and malice in which complex technical aspects are solved." —Geney Beltrán Félix

"A wild ride for protagonist and reader alike." —Kirkus

"A fun and entertaining story of a great literary quality." —Milenio

"Delightfully written, full of revelations … Such a literary discovery." —Radio 3 (RTVE)

From the Publisher

2022-05-11
A labyrinthine short novel, in which each turn sends the reader down another rabbit hole, from an artistically ambitious Mexican writer.

There are at least three possibilities, not mutually exclusive, from which the reader of this novel might choose: Painter José Federico Burgos is narrating the story of a life that has gone totally bonkers. Burgos himself has gone bonkers, and much of the story he's telling takes place inside his head. Or maybe a remarkable painting Burgos has been hired to forge is driving everybody in this novel bonkers. The book begins with the narrator leaping from a high wall, his hand already broken, a jump so dangerous that he’s suspected of attempting suicide. Yet he survives, discovered by golfers, though there is no golf course in the vicinity. And by the end of the novel, he finds himself in a hospital, treated by nuns, his imagination and fantasies unleashed. In between, he recounts a story of struggle, impoverishment, eviction, and his truck being towed, before he is offered a lifeline—a commission to forge a mysterious painting by a black marketeer who resides in an architecturally extravagant domicile, where the man’s father disappeared to his presumed death and his mother remains behind bedroom doors. The reluctant protagonist had previously fallen afoul of the law in a forgery scheme, but his original art has provided little remuneration. And the windfall he is being offered, amid circumstances so desperate, is too good to pass up. And so, one thing leads to another. And another. And another.

A wild ride for protagonist and reader alike.

Kirkus Reviews