Skip to product information
1 of 1

Archipelago Books

The Living and the Rest

The Living and the Rest

by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

Regular price $22.00
Regular price Sale price $22.00
Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when this book and other new titles are available for purchase:

A Financial Times Fiction in Translation Book of the Year and Winner of the Portuguese PEN Prize

A funny and lively tale about a group of writers stranded at a literary festival turns increasingly ominous as it explores the nature of life and of time, and the extraordinary power of imagination and the written word.

Writers from across Africa descend on the Isle of Mozambique to participate in the island’s first literary festival. When a sudden cyclone strikes the land, they are cut off from the mainland.

One writer wakes from sleep with lines running through her head, reaching for a small red notebook with dream trash written on the cover. Another posts a picture of a writing desk gleaming in the ancient light of the Captains-General Palace, now a museum. The caption: “If I had a desk like this, I’m sure I’d write more. I’m sure I’d write better.”

Agualusa traces their conversations as they wonder together whether the world they know has ended, and what, real or imagined, might come next. They talk, and set pens to paper, in this sometimes-surreal tale of how the physical world is changing rapidly around us and how we can (and must) forge new contexts.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770200
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

An impressively skilled and original storyteller, author José Eduardo Agualusa has elevated his original and deftly crafted novel, The Living and the Rest to an imposing level of literary excellence. — Midwest Book Review

For more than 19 years, Monterroso had cultivated Torres as a literary heteronym—an obscure literary term for an authorial persona that takes a life separate from its creator, publishing essays, poetry, or even books in the real world….Strange and fragmented manuscripts like The Rest is Silence…show us how to make room for all the voices that live inside of us.
Jason Boog

View full details
  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 
  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 
  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it