Translation Rights TQE / Where You Are Not

Author of the celebrated novels El arma en el hombre (The Weapon in Man) and Baile con serpientes (Dance with Snakes) —originally published in El Salvador in 1966 and recuperated by Tusquets Editores Mexico in 2002—, Horacio Castellanos Moya presents Donde no estén ustedes (Where You

Are Not), a novel in which this writer —onsidered one of the most brilliant in contemporary Spanish language literature— unfolds his masterly and already demonstrated gifts as a narrator.

After passing through three countries in less than two days, Alberto Aragón arrives in Mexico City. He left San Salvador early in the morning of June 2, 1994, just a few hours after the take-over of

the first post-war government, rejecting «a country that regressed

to the claws of the troglodyte right-wing sanctified during elections.» A date with a young Mexican girl, forty years his junior, awaits him in Mexico City. Alberto Aragón wants to remake his life, marked by alcoholism, old age, and failure in politics and love. It is the last trip of this ex-ambassador of El Salvador in Nicaragua, a representative and middle-man of various forces of the left wing during the process of pacification in his country. He dies in Mexico after a profound crisis, various hallucinating encounters, and a desolate tumbling through taverns. His death as an expatriate leaves unanswered questions that his friends want to clear up. This is how José Pindonga

—a Central American detective hounded by his own demons— steps into the picture, when he moves from San Salvador to Mexico City in order to investigate the secrets of a life that is also an echo of a mixed story of politics, love and treason.

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.