American Delirium - Paperback

by Betina González (Author), Heather Cleary (Translator)

"One dizzying vortex, combining colonial history, generational delusions and psychedelic drug trips. . . . An eerily familiar vision of American madness and decay."
--The New York Times Book Review

From award-winning novelist Betina González, American Delirium is a dizzying, luminous English-language debut about a town overrun by a mysterious hallucinogen and the collision of three unexpected characters' lives through the mayhem.

First, in a small Midwestern city, the deer population starts attacking people. So Beryl, a feisty senior with a troubled past, decides to take matters into her own hands, training a squad of fellow retirees to hunt the animals down and reclaim their own vitality.

At the same time, a group of protesters decides to abandon the "system" and live in the woods, leaving their children and all responsibility behind. Berenice never thought her mother would join the "dropouts," but she's been gone for several days, and the only clue to what might have happened to her is hidden somewhere in her old scrapbook.

Vik, a taxidermist at the natural history museum and an immigrant from the Caribbean, is beginning to see the connections between the dropouts, the deer, and the discord. But he's not about to act on his suspicions--he knows he would somehow be the one to go to jail. Each of these heartfelt and engrossing characters struggles to see their place in a society full of contradictions, but they ultimately rescue one another in surprising ways.

Author Biography

Betina González is the bestselling author of several novels and short-story collections, for which she has won several awards, including the prestigious Premio Tusquets. She earned her MFA in bilingual creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso and her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in Buenos Aires and teaches at the University of Buenos Aires and New York University Buenos Aires.

Heather Cleary translated César Rendueles's Sociophobia and Sergio Chejfec's The Planets and The Dark, among other novels and poetry collections. Her translations have been finalists for the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and she holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.