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The Fake Muse

The Fake Muse

by Max Besora

Translated by Mara Faye Lethem

Published by: Open Letter

Imprint: Open Letter

176 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in

Paperback
9781960385338
Published: February 2025

$16.95

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Winners of the Inaugural Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award

The Fake Muse, Max Besora's follow-up to the wild—and wildly beloved—The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, creates a kaleidoscope of absurd situations that, for even more absurd reasons, end up exploding in uncontrolled violence.

A novel full of humor that begins as a collection of short stories but which, little by little, builds into a choral work, made up of a variety of characters and various literary genres, all of which demonstrate Besora's fantastic imagination and skill as a writer. This culminates in an unforgettable scene in which the protagonist of the book turns the tables on the author and calls into question his motives, why he chooses to create particular subjects for his books and, above all, his responsibility for how he treats them.

Translated by the award-winning Mara Faye Lethem, Besora's The Fake Muse is a delightful, playful novel in the vein of John Barth and Robert Coover, with a contemporary lens.

Max Besora has written five novels: Volcano (2011, rewritten and republished 2021), The Marvelous Technique (2014), The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia (2017), The Fake Muse (2020), and His Master's Voice (2022) and one fictional essay on urban music, Trapology (2018).

Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by Jaume Cabré, David Trueba, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron, Marc Pastor and Toni Sala, among others, and shorter fiction by such authors as Juan Marsé, Rodrigo Fresán, Pola Oloixarac, Teresa Colom and Alba Dedeu. Her translation of The Whispering City, by Sara Moliner, recently received an English PEN Award and two of her translations were nominated for the 2016 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She also won the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award for her translation of Max Besora's The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, 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

"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

"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"—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, bastardized, defiantly inconsistent and totally, gloriously fun."—Daniel Hahn

The Fake Muse

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