| | | | | From award-winning novelist Argentine Betina González, American Delirium is a dizzying, luminous English-language debut about an American town overrun by a mysterious hallucinogen and the collision of three unexpected characters through the mayhem. Keen readers will catch many direct references to the city of Pittsburgh throughout the novel, inspired by Betina's time in the city, when she earned her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Betina González will be joined in conversation with American Delirium translator Heather Cleary and Pittsburgh-based author Anjali Sachdeva. | | | | |  American Delirium, by Betina González
In a small Midwestern city, the deer population starts attacking people. So Beryl, a feisty senior and ex-hippie with a troubled past, decides to take matters into her own hands, training a squad of fellow retirees to hunt the animals down and to prove to society they're capable of more than playing bingo.
At the same time, a group of protesters decides to abandon the "system" and live in the woods, leaving behind the demands of modern life—including their children. Nine-year-old Berenice never thought her mother would join the dropouts, but she's been gone for several days, leaving only a few clues about her past for Berenice to piece together.
Vik, a taxidermist at the natural history museum and an immigrant from the Caribbean, is beginning to see the connections among the dropouts, the deer, and the discord. He's not normally the type to speak up, but when he finds a woman living in his closet, he's forced to get involved. Each of these engrossing characters holds a key to the city's unraveling—despite living on the margins of society—and just as their lives start to spin out of control, they rescue one another in surprising ways. | | | | | "Unsettling, fantastical, and often hilarious . . . [Like] listening to a symphony."
—The Boston Globe
"This has the makings of a zany psychedelic romp, but instead the delirium is marvelously controlled and administered in doses just potent enough to ease patient readers into this off-kilter world. González's distorted utopian vision is a memorable trip."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With piercing insight and prose that evokes the literary flair of César Aira, American Delirium is a surreal exploration of environmental imbalance."
—Lit Hub | | | | |  Betina González (left) is the bestselling author of several novels and short story collections, for which she has won several awards, including the prestigious Premio Tusquets. American Delirium is her first book to be published in English. González earned her MFA in bilingual creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso and her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in Buenos Aires and teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and New York University Buenos Aires.
Anjali Sachdeva's short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, is the winner of the 2019 Chautauqua Prize. It was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, Refinery 29, and BookRiot, longlisted for the Story Prize, and chosen as the 2018 Fiction Book of the Year by the Reading Women podcast. The New York Times Book Review called the collection "strange and wonderful," and Roxane Gay called it, "One of the best collections I've ever read. Every single story is a stand out." Sachdeva is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, and Carnegie Mellon University. She currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the MFA program at Randolph College.
Heather Cleary translated César Rendueles's Sociophobia and Sergio Chejfec's The Planets and The Dark, among other novels and poetry collections. Her translations have been finalists for the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and she holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. | | | | | | | | |
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