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Start giftingKingdom Cons
Narrator
Armando Durán
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Translator
Lisa Dillman
Length
2 hours 24 minutes
Language
English
In the court of the “King,” everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core.
Part surreal fable and part narco-lit romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.
Yuri Herrera, born in Actopan, Mexico, is an acclaimed and award-winning author. His Signs Preceding the End of the World won the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 and was included in many best books of the year lists, including the London Guardian’s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books. His first novel, Kingdom Cons, won the 2004 Premio Binacional de Novela Joven and, when published in Spain won the Premio Otras Voces, Otros Ámbitos, being considered the best work of fiction published in Spain by a jury of 100 people, including editors, journalists and cultural critics. He studied politics in Mexico, creative writing in El Paso, and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Armando Durán has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.
Lisa Dillman is a translator from Spanish and Catalan and a lecturer at Emory University.
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Reviews
“[A] cunning little drama about the line separating art from agitprop.”
“His writing style is like nobody else’s, a unique turn of language, a kind of poetic slang.”
“Herrera combines a dreamlike setting with vigorous style.”
“Short, suspenseful…outlandish and heartbreaking.”
“Strikingly beautiful and thematically rich…the novel is a powerful and memorable meditation on the social and economic value of art in a world ruled by the pursuit of power.”
“Kingdom Cons displays…a gritty and highly stylized realism played out by dramatic, archetypal characters [and] exemplifies, in a host of ways, what leads people to delusional behavior.”
“Herrera is a jumbler of cultural forms, both literary and vernacular. Kingdom Cons is narrated with a bardic omniscience, a mythopoetic tone satisfyingly coarsened by slangy dialogue. The musicality of the prose turns the slim novel into its own kind of narcocorrido.”
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