Horacio Castellanos Moya

Senselessness

, translated by Katherine Silver (New Directions)

Castellanos Moya's first novel to be translated into English is a jet black tragic-comedy. His terrifying central premise is that confessions extracted through torture can become so impassioned that they become indistinguishable from a nation's poetry. In this conversation, poetry, hypocrisy, dictatorship and religion are our subjects.