Mona, Oloixarac Pola

From the critically acclaimed author of Savage Theories and Dark Constellations comes Pola Oloixaracs Mona, where success as a writer of color proves to be a fresh hell for a young Latin American woman abroad.

Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes; she has mysterious bruises on her neck; she pokes fun of American academic culture and its fixation on identity, of which she herself is a beneficiary.

Nominated for the most important literary prize in Europe, Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, and so trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden. Now she is stuck in the company of all her jetlagged--and mostly male--competitors, arriving from Japan, Armenia, Iran, Iceland, Finland, and elsewhere. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and private resentments, stab rivals in the back, and hop in bed together.

As Mona finds that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up with them in the middle of nowhere, her adventures in Scandinavia paint a hypnotic, scabrous, and finally jaw-dropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she both does and does not belong. Mona endures plagiarism, patronization, and endless lectures, until her past catches up with her and she triumphs at last--in apocalyptic fashion.