Four Hands

Four Hands

Description:

The narrators of Paco Ignacio Taibo II's wonderfully inventive novel, Four Hands, are Greg Simon and Julio Fernandez: investigative journalists uncovering an elaborate plot by an obscure American government agency to vilify the Sandinista leadership in Nicaragua. The story they discover and type out together weaves truth with lies, wild humor with tragedy, and reality with fantasyâ€“a stranger-than-fiction tale of imperial excess where delusion makes perfect sense.

Joining such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Leon Trotsky, Pancho Villa, and Stan Laurel is a sprawling cast of characters that includes Alex, a spymaster with a knack for the absurd; Rolando, a depraved Mexican drug trafficker; and Stoyan Vasilev, a geriatric Bulgarian counterspy.

A â€œdocumentary novelâ€ and a passionate satire about the means and ends of politics, Paco Taibo's Four Hands has been compared to the fiction of MarquÃ©z, Dos Passos, Doctorow, and Heller.

Praise:

â€œI am his number one fanâ€¦. I can always lose myself in one of his novels because of the intelligence and humor.â€

â€”Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate

â€œTaibo writes with genuine savvy, a crackling wit and a certain zaniness that is his very ownâ€¦. A storyteller of real genius.â€

â€”Los Angeles Times

â€œLike Bach (or Houdini), the pleasure Taibo offers us consists in watching him set himself a problem of astonishing complexity and then solve it.â€

â€”New York Newsday

â€œItâ€™s impossible to review [Taibo IIâ€™s] literary work without painting an ideological portrait. Heâ€™s probably the writer on the left with the proudest lineage of all those Iâ€™ve read.â€

â€”Christopher DomÃnguez Michael, Letras Libres

â€œTaibo's prose is rich in metaphor, and his confident, insightful storytelling makes the individual pieces of his novel intriguing long before the connections among them are apparent. Dail's translation does fine justice to the author's colorful, virtuosic narrative.â€

â€”Publishers Weekly

About the Author:

Paco Ignacio Taibo II, or PIT, was born in GijÃ³n, Spain in 1949, before fleeing Francoâ€™s dictatorship with his family in 1958. He has resided in Mexico City ever since, where heâ€™s built a career as a writer, journalist, historian, and perhaps most crucially, a founder of the neopolicial genre in Latin America. His books have been published in 29 countries and translated into nearly as many languages. In addition to being a prolific writer, he is an active member of the international crime writing community and organizes Semana Negra or â€œNoir Weekâ€ in his native GijÃ³n. He has won the Latin American Dashiell Hammett Prize three times, as well as the Mexican Premio Planeta, and several other awards for international crime fiction.

About the Translator:

Laura C. Dail graduated from Duke University and received her Masterâ€™s degree in Spanish from Middlebury College. She has served on the board of the Association of Authors Representatives (AAR) and currently chairs the AAR Royalties Committee. A literary agent as well as a translator, she is the head of the Laura Dail Literary Agency.
Country USA
Manufacturer Restless Books
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-01-20
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Restless Books
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2015-01-20
Format	Kindle eBook

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