The Fake Muse

"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 Orp?. 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 Orp?'s life one of the most remarkable in contemporary literature."--Publishers Weekly

"Joan Orp? 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 Orp?, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia"--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, bastardized, defiantly inconsistent and totally, gloriously fun."--Daniel Hahn