The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia

“If Cervantes and the Monty Python guys were shoved into the Large Hadron Collider—and Earth didn’t explode—we might get something like Joan Orpí. How lucky are we to be alive! And to have Max Besora!”—Ryan Chapman, author of Riots I Have Known

“Orpí’s escapades involve witches and brigands, scheming aristocrats and rebellious slaves, another man’s unfaithful wife and the liberated bride of a colonial grandee, even “a giant squid of colossal proportions.” He makes friends with a depressed knight who abhors violence and conspires with a prisoner whose tattoos are purported to reveal an escape route. And it all makes a weirdly riotous kind of sense. As the captain has explained at the outset, although he heard Orpí’s tale from a man who was “four sheets to the wind. Nonetheless, I didst believe him.”—New York Times Book Review

“Dark humor, history, fiction, and misadventures collide in Spanish writer Besora’s wildly imaginative and irreverent English-language debut. . . . Drama, unbelievable escapades, copious footnotes, and comedy blend together seamlessly, and they make Orpí’s life one of the most remarkable in contemporary literature.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Joan Orpí mixes tomfoolery and satire, lampooning so many sacred cows, including empire, history, religion, and literature. Besora’s prose is the real star, merging language of yore with modern day slang. Boisterous, bright, freewheeling, and playful, The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, put simply, is a shit-tonne of fun.”—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books

“Flagrant, shameless, high-voltage, and sometimes just consummately silly. I can’t think of another translator who could have pulled this off, but like any great writer who feels they have total license to do whatever the hell they want with their language, Lethem creates what the narrator describes as ‘a language that constitutes the topography of its own world’, not striving for an accurate period reconstruction, but an archaism that’s invented, anachronistic, bastardised, defiantly inconsistent and totally, gloriously fun.”—Daniel Hahn

“Like Don Quixote, this is a chivalric novel, seasoned with the humor of an author with wit in spades. Besora grew up with the toxic style of the great US underground cartoonists, the ‘Weirdo’ gang, and you can tell.”—Time Out

“An heir to Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and Swift, Besora has conceived his novel as a giant neo-baroque container with room for everything and more besides. The combination of events, registers, genres and characters is manic in its variety.”—Pere Antoni Pons, Ara

“This novel is here to atone for a glaring oversight in the history of Catalan literature, reviving a tradition that has seemed all but dead since the time of Tirant lo Blanc, since any language deserves, at the very least, two great satirical novels; and this one is so Catalan it hurts.”—Montserrat Serra, Vila Web