A Zero-Sum Game

＂Outstanding political fantasy. Eduardo Rabasa has written a futuristic novel set in the present; its inventiveness is not based on new technologies but rather on new kinds of relationships.＂ -- Juan Villoro

A hilarious satire and universal exploration of the origins of power and corruption. A Zero-Sum Game uses the highly-charged election for the presidency of a residents’ committee and the influence of a powerful stranger to both expose those in power and to sympathize with individuals who find themselves caught in the paradox of empowerment and impotence that is modern consumer society and the democratic state.

Eduardo Rabasa is the founding editorial director of Sexto Piso, Mexico’s most prominent independent publishing house, and was selected to the Hay Festival’s México20 list of the greatest Mexican authors under the age of forty.

Eduardo Rabasa studied political science at Mexico’s National University (UNAM), where he graduated with a thesis on the concept of power in the work of George Orwell. He writes a weekly column for the national newspaper Milenio, and has translated books of authors like Morris Berman, George Orwell and W. Somerset Maugham. In 2002 he co-founded Sexto Piso, recognized as one of Mexico’s leading independent publishers, where he currently serves as editorial director. A Zero-Sum Game is his debut novel, published in Mexico by Surplus Ediciones (Sur+), in Spain by Pepitas de calabaza, in Argentina by Godot Ediciones, in France by Éditions Piranha, and in the US by Deep Vellum. In 2015, he was selected among the best 20 young Mexican contemporary authors in the Hay Festival’s México20 project.

Christina MacSweeney is a literary translator specializing in Latin American fiction. Her translations of Valeria Luiselli’s works were published by Granta and Coffee House Press in 2012 and 2013 and 2015 respectively; her translation of Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award in 2015, and The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the same award in 2016, and won the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies México20, and Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare (And Other Stories, 2016). Her most recent published translation, Daniel Saldaña París’s Among Strange Victims, was published by Coffee House Press in spring 2016, and a short story, ＂Piñata,＂ by the same author was included in the 2016 National Translation Month publications.