Mourning

"Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller." —Daniel Alarcón, author of Lost City Radio and The King Is Always Above the People

"It is not often that one encounters such a mix of personal engagement and literary passion, or pain and tenderness." —Andrés Neuman, author of Traveler of the Century and How to Travel Without Seeing

In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon's eponymous narrator travels to Poland, Italy, the U.S., and the Guatemalan countryside in search of secrets he can barely name. He follows memory's strands back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to the contradictory, forbidden stories of his father's Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family, specifically surrounding the long-ago childhood death by drowning of his uncle Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South.

Mourning is a subtle and stirring reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and loss.

Eduardo Halfon moved from Guatemala to the United States at the age of ten and attended school in South Florida and North Carolina. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Roger Caillois Prize, and José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel, he is the author of two previous novels published in English: The Polish Boxer, a New York Times Editors' Choice selection and finalist for the International Latino Book Award, and Monastery, longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.

Eduardo Halfon was born in Guatemala City, moved to the United States at the age of ten, went to school in South Florida, studied industrial engineering at North Carolina State University, and then returned to Guatemala to teach literature for eight years at Universidad Francisco Marroquin. Named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogota, he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Roger Caillois Prize, and Jose Maria de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. He is the author of fourteen books published in Spanish and three novels published in English: The Polish Boxer, a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection and finalist for the International Latino Book Award; Monastery, longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award; and Mourning, forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in May 2018. Halfon currently lives in Nebraska and frequently travels to Guatemala.

Lisa Dillman translates from Spanish and teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has translated numerous books by Spanish and Latin American writers including Andres Barba, Christopher Dominguez Michael, Sabina Berman, and Yuri Herrera. Her translation of Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World received the Best Translated Book Award.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with some fifty books to his name. His translations from Portuguese, Spanish, and French include fiction from Europe, Africa, and the Americas and nonfiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pele. He is also the editor of the new Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. He lives in Lewes, England.