Jakarta

In a chaotic city, the latest in a line of viruses advances as a man recounts the fated steps that led him to be confined in a room with his lover while catastrophe looms. As he takes inventory of the city's ills, a strange stone distorts reality, offering brief glimpses of the deserted territories of his memory. A sports game that beguiles the city with near-religious significance, the hugely popular gambling systems rigged by the Department of Chaos and Gaming, an upbringing in schools that disappeared classmates even if the plagues didn't--everything holds significance and nothing gives answers in the vision realm of his own making.

The turbulent and sweeping world of Jakarta erupts with engrossing new dystopias and magnetic prose to provide a portrait of a fallen society that exudes both rage and resignation.

Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 11/05/2019
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781566895637


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2019
Publishers Weekly 09/02/2019
Shelf Awareness 12/13/2019
Booklist 12/04/2020

About the Author

Rodrigo Márquez Tizano (Mexico City, 1984) is a writer. He has been the editor in chief of VICE magazine in Mexico and Argentina and is a founding editor of La Dulce Ciencia Ediciones, a publishing imprint dedicated to the world of boxing. He received his MFA from NYU and is completing a PhD at Cornell University. Jakarta is his first novel.

Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, most recently The Optic Nerve by María Gainza and The Nocilla Trilogy by Agustín Fernández Mallo. His own writing has appeared in publications such as the Paris Review Daily, the Times Literary Supplement, and the White Review. He is an editor at the literary translation journal In Other Words.