Rodrigo Fresn is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Kensington Gardens, Mantra, The Invented Part, winner of the 2018 Best Translated Book Award, and its sequels, The Dreamed Part and The Remembered Part, and, most recently, Melvill. A self-professed ""referential maniac,"" his works incorporate many elements from science fiction (Philip K. Dick in particular) alongside pop culture and literary references. According to Jonathan Lethem, ""he's a kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."" In 2017, he received the Prix Roger Caillois awarded by PEN Club France every year to both a French and a Latin American writer. Will Vanderhydenreceived an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester. He has translated fiction by Carlos Labb, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Juan Mars, Rafael Snchez Ferlosio, Rodrigo Fresn, and Elvio Gandolfo. He received NEA and Lannan fellowships to translate another of Fresn's novels,The Invented Part.
"""A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room.""--Jonathan Lethem ""Rodrigo Fresán is the new star of Latin American literature. . . . There is darkness in him, but it harbors light within it because his prose--aimed at bygone readers--is brilliant.""--Enrique Vila-Matas ""I've read few novels this exciting in recent years. Mantra is the novel I've laughed with the most, the one that has seemed the most virtuosic and at the same time the most disruptive.""--Roberto Bolaño ""Rodrigo Fresán is a marvelous writer, a direct descendant of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, but with his own voice and of his own time, with a fertile imagination, daring and gifted with a vision as entertaining as it is profound.""--John Banville ""With pop culture cornered by the forces of screen culture, says Fresán (knowing the risk to his profile of 'pop writer, ' even coming out himself to discuss it), there's nothing left but to be classic. That's the only way to keep on writing.""--Alan Pauls"