Hypothermia

Hypothermia explores the perilous limits of love, language, and personality, the brutal gravity of cultural misunderstandings, and the coldly smirking will to self-destruction hiding within our irredeemably carnal lives.

Shocking, erudite, and affecting, these twenty-odd short stories, ＂micro-novels,＂ and vignettes span a vast territory, from Mexico City to Washington, D.C. to the late nineteenth-century Adriatic to the blood-soaked foothills of California’s gold-rush country, introducing an array of bewildering characters: a professor of Latin American literature who survives a tornado and, possibly, an orgy; an electrician confronting the hardest wiring job of his career; a hapless garbage man who dreams of life as a pirate; and a prodigiously talented Polish baritone waging musical war against his church.

Álvaro Enrigue was born in Mexico in 1969. He is an essayist, critic, professor, and the author of several novels and short story collections. His first novel La muerte de un instalador won the 1996 Joaquin Mortiz Prize and in 2012 it was selected as one of the key novels of the Mexican 20th century, and anthologized by Mexico’s largest publishing house. In 2007, the ＂Bogota39＂ project named him one of the most promising Latin American writers of his generation. He has held a Rockefeller Foundation Residence Fellowship at the Bellagio Centre, as well as a Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Brendan Riley is a teacher, writer, and ATA-certified translator of Spanish to English. His translations include The Great Latin American Novel (2016) by Carlos Fuentes, Hypothermia (2013) by Álvaro Enrigue, Caterva (2015) by Juan Filloy, and Antagony (2022) by Luis Goytisolo. Riley’s shorter translations and book reviews have appeared in ANMLY, Asymptote, The Believer, Best European Fiction, BOMBLOG, Bookslut, Drunken Boat, Little Star Journal, n+1, The New York Times, Numéro Cinq, Publishers Weekly, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Three Percent, and The White Review.