Animal Spiral
Luis Othoniel Rosa author Katie Marya translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Charco Press
Publishing:23rd Jun '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 23rd June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The post-colonial birth, life, and death of the collective consciousness known as the Animal.
Middle-aged streamer twins in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, are the first human beings to successfully connect—sharing their consciousness across 34 translucent cables. In that moment, the Animal is born, an intracerebral force that quickly grows to encompass anthills of synaptically entwined bodies, a floating library kitchen redolent of rice and beans far above the Mississippi river, and a transhuman compound in a future Cuba on the Isle of Youth.
Circling back and forth and ever progressing, Animal Spiral moves through 400 years of human, and then post-human history, beginning with a revolution on the streets of San Juan and ending with five brilliant siblings: the Squash (humanoid), Calima (beetles), Yemayá (eels), Coatlicue (serpents), and Juracán (anthropomorphic birds), who have millions of bodies and all the world’s intelligence, but only want to no longer be alone. This is a buoyant, joyous ode to possibility, a warning about the dangers of neglecting what makes us human, and an astonishing exercise of the flexibility and capacity of liminal spaces. Loneliness is a collective disease! We defend our right to madness! Brave are not the ones who resist; brave are the ones who let go!
"In the tradition of the civilizational sagas of Isaac Asimov, and Kim Stanley Robinson, Rosa’s novel contemplates a future in which the collective replaces the individual as the locus of our most intimate desires and fears." —Jeff Lawrence , author of THE ANXIETIES OF EXPERIENCE: THE LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS FROM WHITMAN TO BOLAÑO
"Healing, regenerative, and indispensable, Luis Othoniel Rosa’s Animal Spiral is a brilliant delirium of a novel, an ecstatic catalyst for radical reimaginings, a decolonizing masterpiece of trembling and touch. Probing our most fundamental sociopolitical assumptions to shatter the shackles of petrocolonialism and misogyny, Animal Spiral births a lush new world." —Joy Castro , author of ONE BRILLIANT FLAME
"Animal Spiral is a phenomenon of nature, exploring ways of narrating the collective experience of the species – and the possibilities of a new literary form." —Bazar Americano
"One of the most brilliant young writers of our time." —Marta Aponte Alsina , author of LA MUERTE FELIZ DE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
"A master work capable of redeeming a broken world." —Carlos Fonseca , author of AUSTRAL
"Good fiction, transcendent fiction, the kind that burns, seems to have only two ways to escape irrelevance: to weave a narrative about nothingness or to embark on the adventure of telling everything. Animal Spiral raises its monumental, spiralling architecture on the shoulders of the latter path. From the ruins of our capitalist, colonial world, he gives birth to something new, hopeful and cruel, complex, contradictory, courageous." —Sebastián Martínez Daniell , author of TWO SHERPAS
"Something is happening in Puerto Rico. In a world that the powerful insist on subjugating, critical and unbridled imagination rises up. This is not just another narrative of the end of the world, but rather its continuation by other means. With a wild, delirious intelligence, Animal Spiral is a visionary work of fiction that seeks to construct, on the basis of carnal and complete connection, a beyond that flourishes in collectivity and the death of the individual." —Cristina Rivera Garza , author of NO ONE WILL SEE ME CRY
"Animal Spiral takes readers on a ride from the roots of human consciousness to modernity and beyond (…). More than science fiction, Animal Spiral is speculative anarchism with shades of Luisa Capetillo, William Burroughs and Octavia Butler." —Dr. Michael Cucher
ISBN: 9781917260329
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
448 pages