Monastery

Reader’s Digest Great New Book World 

Literature Today Holiday Gift Guide Recommendation 

“Offer[s] surprise & revelation at every turn.” — Reader’s Digest 

“Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller.” —DANIEL ALARCÓN, author of At Night We Walk in Circles.

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In Monastery, the nomadic narrator of Eduardo Halfon’s critically-acclaimed The Polish Boxer returns to travel from Guatemalan cities, villages, coffee plantations, & border towns to a private jazz concert in New York’s Harlem, a former German U-Boat base on the French Breton coast, & Israel, where he escapes from his sister’s Orthodox Jewish wedding into an erotic adventure with the enigmatic Tamara. His passing encounters are unforgettable; his relationships, problematic.

At once a world citizen & a writer who mistrusts the power of language, he is pursued by history’s ghosts & unanswerable questions. He is a cartographer of identity on a compelling journey to an uncertain destination. As he draws & redraws his boundaries, he confronts us with the limitations of our own.

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Eduardo Halfon was named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá & is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship & the prestigious José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. The Polish Boxer, his first book to appear in English, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection & finalist for the International Latino Book Award. Halfon is currently the Harman Writer in Residence at Baruch College in New York & travels frequently between his homes in Nebraska & Guatemala.

Lisa Dillman teaches in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Emory University & has translated numerous works of fiction by Argentine, Mexican, Catalan, & Spanish writers. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.