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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > Sudden Death

Sudden Death

A funny and mind-bending novel about the clash of empires and ideas in the sixteenth century, told over the course of one dazzling tennis match.

A brutal tennis match in Rome.

Two formidable opponents: the wild Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo.

Galileo, Saint Matthew and Mary Magdalene heckle from the sidelines.

In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time.

Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history.

Over the course of one dazzling tennis match – through assassinations and executions, carnal liaisons and papal dramas, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war – Sudden Death tells the grand adventure of the clash of empires and the dawn of the modern era.

Author

Álvaro Enrigue

Álvaro Enrigue

Books

Sudden Death

Álvaro Enrigue was born in Mexico in 1969. He is the award-winning author of five novels and two books of short stories. His first novel La muerte de un instalador won the 1996 Joaquín Mortiz Prize. In 2007, the Bogotá39 project named him one of the most promising Latin American writers of his generation.

Enrigue is the former literary editor of Mexico’s leading literary publication Letras Libres. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, n+1, Bomb Magazine and his short stories have been widely anthologized.

In 2012-13 he was Research Fellow and Visiting Professor at Princeton University. The previous year he was awarded the prestigious Cullman Fellowship by the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers. In 2009 the Rockefeller Foundation named him Resident Fellow at the Bellagio Center. He was, in 2008, GQ Magazine’s (Latin America) Writer of the Year.

Translator

Natasha Wimmer

Natasha Wimmer

Books

Sudden Death

Natasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English. Wimmer learned Spanish in Spain, where she spent four years growing up.

She has also translated Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Language of Passion, The Way to Paradise, and Letters to a Young Novelist, as well as Dirty Havana Trilogy by the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.

She received the PEN American Center Translation Prize in 2009.

Published by

Harvill Secker, 2016
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A funny and mind-bending novel about the clash of empires and ideas in the sixteenth century, told over the course of one dazzling tennis match.

A brutal tennis match in Rome.

Two formidable opponents: the wild Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo.

Galileo, Saint Matthew and Mary Magdalene heckle from the sidelines.

In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time.

Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history.

Over the course of one dazzling tennis match – through assassinations and executions, carnal liaisons and papal dramas, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war – Sudden Death tells the grand adventure of the clash of empires and the dawn of the modern era.

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