Translation Rights TQE / Dance with Snakes

One day an old yellow Chevrolet appears parked in the street. Jacinto Bustillo, an odd homeless man who awakens the suspicions of the neighbors lives inside of it. Eduardo Sosa decides to find out who he is and what he wants. Due to patience or perhaps to solitude, Jacinto ends up accepting Sosa’s company. Destiny, however, can change overnight: Jacinto dies decapitated and a psychopath inherits the Chevrolet and its inhabitants: a group of serpents with frozen eyes that act as if their souls are possessed, and begin to tell hallucinating stories about infidelities, jealousy and vengeance that rise to the murder and falling apart of entire lives. Three voices – that of the crazed serpent leader, the policeman Handal and the reporter Rita Mena – narrate the delirium that climbs over the crime and that becomes wrapped in vertiginous police activity and a need for destruction that manifests the weak and corrupt foundations of the State.

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He was brought up in El Salvador and has lived, since 1979, in different cities throughout America and Europe. He worked as a journalist in Mexico City for twelve years and lived in Frankfurt, Germany, as a guest writer of the International Frankfurt Book Fair. He currently teaches in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has been invited as a guest professor at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of eight novels, six of which have been published by Tusquets, translated into several languages and critically acclaimed. In 2009 the English translation of his novel Insensatez (Senselessness) received the XXVIII Northern California Book Award.