Season of the Swamp

Description

Season of the Swamp
by Yuri Herrera

ISBN: 9781644453070
Hardcover, new

Brief Description:
A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of
Signs Preceding the End of the World New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named
Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years
later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the
postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any
other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans. Accompanied
by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for
victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city,
which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs,
suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and
confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of
yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But
unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as
they try to shape their future. Though the historical archive is silent
about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera
imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With
the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have
characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a
magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New
Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs
our understanding of the world we live in.