Sudden Death
'Glorious' New York Times
'Endlessly inventive', Guardian, Best Books of 2016
'Wildly funny' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
As Caravaggio, the libertine of Italy’s art world, and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo aim to settle scores over the course of one brutal tennis match, the old European order edges closer to eruption.
Across the ocean, in early sixteenth-century Mexico, the Aztec Empire is under the fatal grip of Hernán Cortés and his Mayan lover. While they scheme and conquer, fight and fuck, their domestic comedy will change the course of history, throwing the world – and Rome’s tennis match – into a mind-bending reverie of assassinations, executions, papal dramas, carnal liaisons and artistic revolution.
Translated by Natasha Wimmer, the prize-winning translator of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and 2666.
Álvaro Enrigue is a prize-winning Mexican writer whose most recent novel is You Dreamed of Empires. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, El País, and n+1, among other publications. A former Fellow at the Cullman Center and at Princeton University, he teaches Latin American Literature at Hofstra University and lives with his family in New York City.
Natasha Wimmer (Translator)
Natasha Wimmer’s translations include Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires and Sudden Death and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.