Monastery

Best Translated Book Award Longlist
Reader’s Digest Great New Book
World Literature Today Holiday Gift Guide Recommendation

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

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

In Monastery, the nomadic narrator of Eduardo Halfon’s critically-acclaimed The Polish Boxer returns to travel from Guatemalan cities, villages, coffee plantations, and border towns to a private jazz concert in New York’s Harlem, a former German U-Boat base on the French Breton coast, and 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 and a writer who mistrusts the power of language, he is pursued by history’s ghosts and unanswerable questions. He is a cartographer of identity on a compelling journey to an uncertain destination. As he draws and redraws his boundaries, he confronts us with the limitations of our own.

Eduardo Halfon was named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and 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 and finalist for the International Latino Book Award. Halfon is currently the Harman Writer in Residence at Baruch College in New York and travels frequently between his homes in Nebraska and Guatemala.