In Christopher David Rosales' debut novel, Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper, he creates a completely unique vision that seamlessly blends tropes of magical realism and dystopian fiction in a portrait of power in America that we've never seen before. Imagine it as the communal love child of Marquez, Bolano, and Orwell, a child who inhabits an America that resembles Pinochet's Chile, and yet feels uncannily (and frighteningly) familiar to present day Los Angeles. A world in which street assassin Tre, a young and much beloved brother and son, finds himself caught in a city where all its citizens, even its most dangerous, are potential targets in the on-going power struggle between an authoritarian military regime and a not-so-community friendly guerrilla force. As Percival Everett says, "This novel treats revolution, love, betrayal and magic with equal adeptness and intelligence. In a world that is at once ours and foreign Rosales makes characters that will be remembered when the novel is done. This is a truly fine piece of work."
Industry Reviews
"This novel treats revolution, love, betrayal and magic with equal adeptness and intelligence. In a world that is at once ours and foreign Rosales makes characters that will be remembered when the novel is done. This is a truly fine piece of work." - Percival Everett, author of Erasure and winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts "Christopher David Rosales's Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper is an exuberantly paced, intellectually lively Moebius strip of a book, flexing from family saga to outlaw picaresque, from sex-farce to political tragedy. Like a sprawling Aira or a compact Marquez, Rosales portrays life in a town of cosmic betweenness, a town of competing violences in which reading makes an uncanny claim on survival. Funny, sexy, smart, tender, and above all nimble, this book's laughter echoes in the twentieth century's long and persistent shadow." - Joyelle McSweeney, author of Salamandrine: 8 Gothics and Dead Youth, or, The Leaks "Rosales reads like early Marquez meets Bel Canto, with a shade of noir thrown in. A complex and satisfying story of a family stuck between revolution, the law, and crime, in which difficult moments are offered with a beautiful and satisfying lightness that makes them shimmer and resonate and remain with you for good." - Brian Evenson, author of The Wavering Knife and A Collapse of Horses "In Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper, Christopher David Rosales writes with rare skill and real power about a high-stakes, heart-breaking world filled with beauty and the bullet-hot barrels of guns. This is to say that even as we travel sometimes far from the familiar with him, down streets and through neighborhoods we've never quite heard of, Rosales has written about our world, the only one we have, the only one we get, and he has done it with clear eyes, fine prose and courage." - Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome, Kind One, and Indiana, Indiana "Like a stone from a slingshot, a bird on the wing, Christopher David Rosales's elegant, lyric, dynamic tale of perseverance and dignity in a brown, near-future Los Angeles soars from the lower depths and pierces the Cyclops-eye of America's well-armed political and economic elites as it seeks its goal in light." - Michael Mejia, author of Forgetfulness "This novel reaches into the back of your mind, the base of your skull, and it urges forth memories and feelings and images you didn't know you had, but that now you'll never forget." - Stephen Graham Jones, author of Ledfeather
