The Extinction of Irena Rey
Checking Availibility...Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, TOWN & COUNTRY, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, CRIMEREADS, DOCUMENT JOURNAL, AND WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS * NAMED A MUST READ BY NPR, PEOPLE, VANITY FAIR, NYLON, ALTA JOURNAL, AND DEBUTIFUL
International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist Jennifer Croft's madly brilliant mystery novel of transformation and translation in Europe's last great wilderness.
"Savvy, sly, and hard to classify. A bacchanal." -New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"Fiercely inventive." -Washington Post
"Knives Out on mushrooms." -Elle
"Could only be written by master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun, and absolutely alive." -Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Eight translators gather in the primeval forest home of the world-renowned Irena Rey. They are there to translate her magnum opus together, but within days of their arrival, Irena disappears.
The translators embark on a frantic search, delving into ancient woods filled with strange flora, fauna, and fungi and examining her enigmatic texts and belongings for clues. But doing so reveals secrets they are utterly unprepared for, and they quickly find themselves tangled up in a web of rivalries and desires that threaten not only their work, but the fate of their beloved author herself.
About this Author
Jennifer Croft won a Guggenheim Fellowship for this novel, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir, Homesick, and the International Booker Prize for her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She is also the translator of Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula's August, Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. She has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa.
Reviews
"Bizarre and brilliant . . . above all tremendous fun . . . The Extinction of Irena Rey teems with rabbit-hole delights at every turn right up to the delicious final twist." --Wall Street Journal
"Absolutely bizarre in the best way, it's a fever dream of deception and desire." --People Magazine
"Translator Jennifer Croft sends up her vocation in this waggish literary mystery." --Vanity Fair
"Wild . . . joyous." --Lauren Groff, Bustle
"Croft has constructed a canny exploration of how even English, despite its unique dominance, might be influenced by its brushes with the mysterious process that is translation." --The Atlantic
"Oh my mushrooms, The Extinction of Irena Rey is incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn't put it down . . . mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal." --New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"The Extinction of Irena Rey surprised me at every turn, moving between profound observations about nature, art, and communication . . . and surreal and baffling happenings that push the characters into a kind of fever-dream reality. Croft has certainly added 'novelist' to the list of writing-related skills she excels at, and what a joy that is to witness." --NPR.org
"Croft subverts expectations with a blackly comic, fiercely inventive drama that explores the cult of celebrity and the art of translation (an art this critically acclaimed, award-winning translator has mastered)." --Washington Post
"As bewildering and beckoning as its cover, Jennifer Croft's locked-room mystery is something like Agatha Christie or Knives Out on mushrooms-ones not unlike those in the book itself." --Elle
"Wrought in lively prose and complemented by a dazzling suite of meta-textual hijinks set to the beat of a mystery novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey is an empathetic and comic investigation of the role of the translator within the literary project." --The Rumpus
"Croft spins such a seductive tale, it's impossible not to get sucked in." --Bustle
"[A] fun house of a debut novel . . . [The Extinction of Irena Rey] becomes not just a literary thriller but an examination of the delicate mix of desire, impersonation, ambition, and selfishness that the art of literary translation requires." --The New Republic
"Croft never misses a beat, drawing upon her translation background to deliver a juicy, bordering on absurd, intricate mediation on celebrity, communication, nature and the art of language." --The Seattle Times
"Croft has reinvented ecofiction with this seductive, erudite, and terribly funny tale about 'book people.'" --World Literature Today
"The Extinction of Irena Rey is bursting with energy and cleverness, Croft's abundant linguistic gifts and stimulating ideas on display" --New York Review of Books
"The Extinction of Irena Rey complects and complicates the relationships between translation and border politics, art and nature, image and text, truth and myth. It is about not just the extinction of its demigod-like author, but, perhaps, all of us." --Document Journal
"An interpersonal cacophony that crackles outward. . . a cleverly layered, multivocal novel that plays with our expectations of who is speaking and how meaning gets made in between authors, translators, and readers." --Chicago Review of Books
"A great homage to the art of translation and the circulatory system of language." --Charlottesville Daily Progress
"A fascinating exploration of art, celebrity, jealousy, and the wonders of nature." --AudioFile Magazine
"An astute take on human communication and the perils of the planet, embedded in a crafty detective mystery." --On the Seawall
"A dizzying novel . . . Croft's sense of humor and her finely drawn characters combine with her gift for depicting the beautiful but forbidding Bialowieza Forest to make The Extinction of Irena Rey a grand entertainment. This is a serious novel, but at the same time, one that doesn't take itself too seriously." --Alta Journal
"The Extinction puts translators first, and with humor and grace explores art, celebrity, and the power of language." --Lit Hub
"Jennifer Croft is the renowned translator of Olga Tokarczuk and this debut takes full advantage of her background in the best way possible." --CrimeReads
"Croft serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators . . . This is a blast." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"[The Extinction of Irena Rey] is a metatextual feast that will keep readers wondering even after the book concludes." --Library Journal, starred review
"Delightfully wry." --Booklist, Starred Review
"Croft's exquisite facility with language is on full display throughout, both in wordplay and in evocative descriptions, particularly of place." --Bookreporter.com
"An incisive literary novel that troubles the divide between art, its interpretation, and real life." --Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
"Croft . . . makes for a wickedly funny satirist when it comes to some of the more obsequious behaviors involved in the translator-author relationship. At the same time-even in the midst of a joke-she writes profoundly about the philosophical stakes of translation." --Kirkus Reviews
"A wild and wonderfully unruly novel about translation and transmission, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a showcase for Jennifer Croft's acrobatic intellect, delicious humor, and voluptuous prose." --Katie Kitamura, author of INTIMACIES
"The Extinction of Irena Rey could only be written by master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun and absolutely alive." --Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of CHAIN GANG ALL STARS
"Mischievous and intellectually provocative, The Extinction of Irena Rey asks thrilling questions about the wilderness of language, the life of the forest, and the feral ambitions and failings of artists." --Megha Majumdar, author of A BURNING
"Generous and strange, funny and disconcerting, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a playground for the mind and an entrancing celebration of the sociality of reading, writing, and translation written by a master practitioner of all three.
" --Alexandra Kleeman, author of SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
"In The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft mines the complexity of translation, adoration, and symbiosis. At once a meditation on the networks required to bring literature to worldwide readers and a page-turner about the inevitable fallibilities of those systems, Extinction's push and pull is both thought-provoking and thrilling. I was rapt." --Emily Nemens, author of THE CACTUS LEAGUE
"Croft writes with an remarkable intensity." --Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize-winning author of FLIGHTS and DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD
"An exquisite pleasure. Croft unearths the interconnection between land and communities, revealing the collaborative networks of forests as clearly and incisively as she does that of the literary world. In this exquisite pleasure of a novel, in which I luxuriated on every page, Croft mines the vicissitudes of the translation world to reveal quite plainly that everything is connected, and translators deserve more." --Chelsea T. Hicks, author of A CALM & NORMAL HEART
"A rollicking romp that follows a group of translators as they search for their missing author through the primeval forest of Bialowieza; months later, part of my brain is still wandering among those trees." --Words Without Borders, "Best Books We Read This Year"
"A wild, twisty literary adventure reflecting on the art of translation and the power of language." --Town & Country, Best Books of the Year
If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.
