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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Marie Arendt |
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FREEDOM IS A FEAST
Alejandro Puyana's debut, Freedom is a Feast, is a sweeping, big-hearted novel of contemporary Venezuela.
The novel centers around the birth of the leftist movement in Venezuela; the coup that briefly deposed Chávez in 2002; and Chávez's death in 2013, the reverberations of which still echo. It tells the larger political story, over the shoulders of three characters: Stanislavo, a seasoned journalist and loyalist in The Movement, María, a single mother who commutes across Caracas to clean houses for a well-to-do family, and her vulnerable son, Eloy, each of whom bear the scars of a country that the author calls "both hard to love, and impossible not to."
Freedom is a Feast is a political novel on a human scale - inspired in that sense by some of Alejandro's favorite books: Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs, and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West.
Alejandro Puyana is just completing his MFA in Fiction at the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas, where he is in his final year as a Fellow. While there he has studied with Amy Hempel, Elizabeth McCracken and Laura van den Berg, as well as Bret Anthony Johnston. His fiction has appeared in multiple publicationshis story "The Hands of Dirty Children" won the inaugural Halifax Ranch Prize from American Short Fiction, chosen by ZZ Packer, was selected by Curtis Sittenfeld for Best American Short Stories 2020, and was recently reprinted by Electric Lit. Other stories have appeared in New England Review, Tin House, and Idaho Review.
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Book
Published 2024-08-20 by Little, Brown |