Mona

From the critically acclaimed author of Savage Theories and Dark Constellations comes Pola Oloixarac’s Mona, where success as a "writer of color" proves to be a fresh hell for a young Latin American woman abroad. Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior: she likes drugs and cigarettes, has mysterious bruises on her neck, and pokes fun of American academic culture and its identity-fixation, of which she herself is a beneficiary: "In her role of overeducated Latina in the era of Trump, Mona experienced her serene captivity as a kind of freedom . . ." Nominated for "the most important literary prize in Europe," Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, and so trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden. Now she is stuck in the company of all her jetlagged—and mostly male—competitors, arriving from Japan, Armenia, Iran, Iceland, Finland, and elsewhere. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: complement each other, envy each other, stab each other in the back, and go to bed with one another. Finding she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up in the middle of nowhere with them, Mona's adventures in Scandinavia paint a hypnotic, scabrous, and finally jawdropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she both does and does not belong. Bearing scars that are by no means merely literary, Mona endures plagiarism, patronization, and endless lectures, until her past catches up with her, and she triumphs at last, in a truly apocalyptic fashion. "Pola Oloixarac is one of the great writers of the Internet, the only country larger than Argentina." —Joshua Cohen