We are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara with Valeria Luiselli

Join us for a conversation with Booker shortlisted author Gabriela Cabezón Cámara to celebrate her third novel, a stunning and surreal satire that brings themes of resilience, transformation, and courage up against the history of colonialism in Latin America . She will be in conversation with Valerie Luiselli, followed by a signing.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

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Lyrical and swashbuckling, tender and surreal, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s new novel finds glimmers of hope for the future in the brutal history of colonial Latin America.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he’s become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a cabin boy, mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, and conquistador. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis.

Based on a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire, a surreal picaresque rich with wildly imaginative language and searing critique of subjugation, colonialism, and tyranny of all kinds. In this masterful subversion of Latin American history, Cabezón Cámara finds in the rainforest a magically alive space where transformation is not only possible but necessary.

The Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (b. 1968) has worked at varied jobs, from selling car insurance in the street to cultural journalism. She is the author of the novels Slum Virgin, Romance of the Blonde Brunette, and The Adventures of China Iron, which was shortlisted for the International Booker and Médicis prizes. She is an environmental activist and a co-founder of the feminist movement Ni una menos.

Photo Credit: Diego Berruecos

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of , , , and . Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive was an international critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019, won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Booker Prize 2019 among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others.” Her work is published in more than thirty languages. She is a professor at Bard College.

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