The National Telepathy

In September 1933, the Peruvian Rubber Company delivers nineteen indigenous people from the Amazon to businessman Amado Dam, intended for Argentina's first Ethnographic Theme Park. Unexpected among the human cargo is an artefact harbouring a sloth with a fascinating yet terrifying secret: the ability to create erotically explosive telepathic connections between people. What ensues is a raucous satire of men's fear of women's bodies, of the illusion of logic in the structures of so-called civilisation, and the way class and race obscure identities when the observer is a man with power.

In The National Telepathy, Roque Larraquy, one of the most original voices in contemporary Argentinian literature, brings us a literary high-wire act, an over-the-top comic grotesque about atrocity. This shocking, bizarre, funny, imaginative novel lays all-too-bare the secret longings and not-so-secret machinations of a social class that will stop at nothing in order to stay on top.

Roque Larraquy (Buenos Aires, 1975) is the author of the novels La comemadre (2011), nominated for the USA National Book Awards (2018), the National Translation Book Award (2018) and the Dublin Literary Award (2020); Informe sobre ectoplasma animal (2014), a book illustrated by visual artist Diego Ontivero; and The National Telepathy, chosen as one the best ten books in Spanish of 2020 by The New York Times, and so far translated into Portuguese, English and French. Until 2022 Larraquy was the inaugural director of the BA in Creative Writing at the Universidad Nacional de Las Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Frank Wynne is a literary translator. Born in Ireland, he moved to France in 1984 where he discovered a passion for language working as a bookseller in Paris. He began translating literature in the late 1990s before deciding to devote himself to this full time. He has translated works by Michel Houellebecq, Fr?d?ric Beigbeder, Ahmadou Kourouma, Boualem Sansal, Claude Lanzmann, and Almudena Grandes. His work has earned him several awards, including the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Premio Valle Incl?n. Most recently, his translation of Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes was shortlisted for the Man Booker International 2018. In 2022 his translation of The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter won the Dublin Literary Award.