About the Author

Max Besora started his career as a poet, and has since gone on to publish three novels, including Volcano and The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, Conquistador and Founder of Catalonia, which received the 2018 City of Barcelona Prize for Catalan Literature. He also plays trumpet in a jazz band and is currently co-writing a non-fiction book about rap music.

Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by Jaume Cabre, David Trueba, Albert Snchez Piol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron, Marc Pastor and Toni Sala, among others, and shorter fiction by such authors as Juan Marse, Rodrigo Fresn, Pola Oloixarac, Teresa Colom, and Alba Dedeu. Her translation of The Whispering City by Sara Moliner recently received an English PEN Award and two of her translations were nominated for the 2016 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Reviews

"If Cervantes and the Monty Python guys were shoved into the Large Hadron Collider--and Earth didn't explode--we might get something like Joan Orpí. How lucky are we to be alive! And to have Max Besora!"--Ryan Chapman, author of Riots I Have Known "Dark humor, history, fiction, and misadventures collide in Spanish writer Besora's wildly imaginative and irreverent English-language debut. . . . Drama, unbelievable escapades, copious footnotes, and comedy blend together seamlessly, and they make Orpí's life one of the most remarkable in contemporary literature."--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Joan Orpí mixes tomfoolery and satire, lampooning so many sacred cows, including empire, history, religion, and literature. Besora's prose is the real star, merging language of yore with modern day slang. Boisterous, bright, freewheeling, and playful, The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, put simply, is a shit-tonne of fun."--Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books "Flagrant, shameless, high-voltage, and sometimes just consummately silly. I can't think of another translator who could have pulled this off, but like any great writer who feels they have total license to do whatever the hell they want with their language, Lethem creates what the narrator describes as 'a language that constitutes the topography of its own world', not striving for an accurate period reconstruction, but an archaism that's invented, anachronistic, bastardised, defiantly inconsistent and totally, gloriously fun."--Daniel Hahn "Like Don Quixote, this is a chivalric novel, seasoned with the humor of an author with wit in spades. Besora grew up with the toxic style of the great US underground cartoonists, the 'Weirdo' gang, and you can tell."--Time Out "An heir to Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and Swift, Besora has conceived his novel as a giant neo-baroque container with room for everything and more besides. The combination of events, registers, genres and characters is manic in its variety."--Pere Antoni Pons, Ara "This novel is here to atone for a glaring oversight in the history of Catalan literature, reviving a tradition that has seemed all but dead since the time of Tirant lo Blanc, since any language deserves, at the very least, two great satirical novels; and this one is so Catalan it hurts."--Montserrat Serra, Vila Web