Yuri Herrera
Season of the Swamp
New Orleans, 1853. A young Zapotec exile from Mexico named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city.
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the stark trade in human beings.
With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.
Read an ExcerptMore Info
- You can listen to a recording of Yuri Herrera speaking to the BBC World Service about his writing here.
- Yuri Herrera answers twenty questions from the TLS here.
- You can also read The Skinny‘s interview with Yuri Herrera.
- Yuri Herrera answers eight questions from 3:AM here.
- Read about Yuri Herrera’s previous titles: Signs Preceding the End of the World, The Transmigration of Bodies, Kingdom Cons, A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire and Ten Planets.
Author: Yuri Herrera
Original language: Spanish
Format: Ebook
Publication date: 5 November 2024
ISBN: 9781916751101
Ebook ISBN: 9781916751118
Reviews
Nicolás Medina Mora
New York Times Book Review
‘Virtuosic. . . . The Juárez that Herrera conjures with his muscular prose – translated with bravura by Lisa Dillman . . . is above all a pair of eyes and ears. He’s an observer alive to the world, endowed with the foreigner’s curiosity and the subaltern’s ironic scepticism.’
Sam Sacks
Wall Street Journal
‘Richly imagined, profusely written.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘The New Orleans depicted here is carnivalesque, and the surreal spectacle of bear fights, spontaneous parades, and clandestine meetings, added to Benito’s colourful dreams about liberation and justice, give the story a vibrant, almost hallucinatory feel. . . . A thoughtful portrait of one revolutionary’s remarkable resilience, far from home.’
Wilson Wong
New York Times
‘This work of speculative fiction takes up a centuries-old mystery involving a young Benito Juárez, who was Mexico’s first Indigenous president, and his relatively unknown 18-month exile in New Orleans. Herrera imagines a colourful life during a turbulent time in a culturally radiant city at the edge of a swamp.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘As glorious and messy as the best New Orleans gumbo, the novel comes together as Herrera vividly depicts the chaos of Mardi Gras. It’s a triumph.’
Julia Kastner
Shelf Awareness
‘A sense of wonder and play, linguistic curiosity, and a knack for being both morbid and funny, contribute to an absorbingly pleasurable read, even amid the death and tragedy. Herrera offers another brilliant novella steeped in political and historical time and place.’
Paul Yoon
‘The always thrilling and always remarkable Yuri Herrera has outdone himself here: reading Season of the Swamp is like being thrown into deep water only to open your eyes and find a haunting and haunted world, one full of magic and beauty, exiles and outsiders, longing and song. I didn’t want to surface – here I am still, in its great, brilliant light.’
Brittany Allen
Literary Hub
‘Told in Herrera’s typically sparkling, form-exploding language, this one is screaming “modern epic.”’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘As glorious and messy as the best New Orleans gumbo, the novel comes together as Herrera vividly depicts the chaos of Mardi Gras. It’s a triumph.’
