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by Mateo García Elizondo
A junkie looking for one last fix in a town full of ghosts.
This is a ghost story. A junkie has gone to El Zapotal to die – to rent a room in this crumbling backwater, melt into one last fix, and not come back. For someone so ready to no longer be alive, though, he can't stop clinging to the past. His old dog, Kid, who he abandoned. His love, Valerie, who he introduced to drugs. There's no such thing as a good memory.
El Zapotal doesn't want him either. The people aren't welcoming, the streets are empty except for strays, and he's having trouble pacing his supply. As the drugs run out, the line between what's real and what's not blurs to the point of illegibility, and we're left wandering a tenderly described hinterland of despair, hunger, and regret. García Elizondo has given us an homage to Pedro Páramo , a descent for the ages, a long goodbye with no clear line between the living and dead.
"Stunning... An instant classic." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Elizondo García is carving his own path at the forefront of a burgeoning scene in Spanish language literature." ―The Guardian
"One of the most promising first novels to be published recently in Spanish." ―La Vanguardia
"A hypnotic odyssey through the dark depths of the soul and of Mexico." ―Le Monde
This information about Last Date in El Zapotal was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mateo García Elizondo (Mexico City, 1987) is a screenwriter and author. His work has appeared in magazines such as Nexos , Revista Casa de las Américas , Quimera, Origami, and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos . He has written scripts for film and graphic narrative, including the screenplay for the feature film Desierto (2015), which won the FIPRESCI prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. His debut novel, Last Date in El Zapotal, won the City of Barcelona Award for fiction written in Spanish. In 2021 he was listed by Granta magazine as one of the world's best writers in Spanish under thirty-five years of age.
Robin Myers is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M. (Copper Canyon Press); The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón (Archipelago Books); A Whale Is a Country (Fonograf Editions) and In Vitro (Coffee House Press), both by Isabel Zapata; Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books); and many other works of poetry and prose from across Latin America. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Yale Review, The Drift, Poetry London, and elsewhere; her essays, in Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and Latin American Literature Today .
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