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A Novel
by Julián Delgado Lopera
From the award-winning author of Fiebre Tropical, an electric, highly anticipated novel set in Colombia's underground queer scene.
It is a known fact that the queens who refuse their destiny are haunted. Rejection turns itself inward, a bullet to the heart of said queen, and unleashes, per Travesti Lore, a river of curses.
Cloistered in a dreary Bogotá apartment, Ignacio's light has dimmed, leaving his teenage daughter, Valentina, to raise herself in the wake of her mother Alma's death. Lonely and love-starved, Valentina aches to discover the details of her mother's drowning, and for her father to snap out of his depression. But Ignacio can't. He spends listless afternoons smoking cigarettes in long blonde wigs, telenovelas humming in the background, haunted not only by matrimonial guilt, but by memories of a young man he once loved and betrayed.
From Ignacio's tragic past emerges the luminous queen of Bogotá's queer underground, Mamadora Eléctrica, the wise travesti who he first met under the silvery lights of Club Aquario when he was just a shy country boy. With Alma gone, Mamadora steps in as a mother figure to Valentina the way she once did for the girl's father. But as an expert in Travesti Lore, she fears the worst: that Ignacio's self-destruction may have unleashed a curse on them all.
From "a writer who is grinding their own colors" (Dwight Garner, New York Times), Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You is a profound and richly imagined story about coming undone.
"Delgado Lopera dives into Colombia's taboo queer culture in this scintillating narrative of a man torn between belonging and self-expression...The author's turns of phrase are striking and indelible, and the characters are deeply and lovingly portrayed...It's exquisite." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A stark portrait of the damage passed from parent to child." —Kirkus Reviews
"Every once in a while you come across a book so bursting with life that the pages seem to be sprouting, delivered in a never-heard-before idiom that must have been invented just to transmit so much aliveness. Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You is that book and Julián Delgado Lopera is one of the most exciting writers in all the Americas." ―Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition, Baby
"Delgado Lopera is a writer whose sentences make your heart race, and Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You, with its unmasking of lies, makings of new truths, insights into the human heart, is generous, imaginative, revelatory, enraging, and loving. Read it and let the lightning of its prose bring you alive again." ―Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
This information about Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You 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.
Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of Fiebre Tropical, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Aspen Literary Prize, among other honors. Born and raised in Colombia, Julián teaches Creative Writing at CUNY. He lives in Brooklyn.
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