Season of the Swamp

A Novel

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Pub Date Oct 01 2024 | Archive Date Sep 30 2024

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Description

A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.

Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at...


Advance Praise

“The always thrilling and always remarkable Yuri Herrera has outdone himself here: reading Season of the Swamp is like being thrown into deep water only to open your eyes and find a haunting and haunted world, one full of magic and beauty, exiles and outsiders, longing and song. I didn’t want to surface—here I am still, in its great, brilliant light.”—Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey

“The always thrilling and always remarkable Yuri Herrera has outdone himself here: reading Season of the Swamp is like being thrown into deep water only to open your eyes and find a haunting and...


Marketing Plan

National publicity campaign 

Bookseller outreach campaign

3-city author tour

Social media promotion

Targeted digital advertising

National publicity campaign 

Bookseller outreach campaign

3-city author tour

Social media promotion

Targeted digital advertising


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781644453070
PRICE $26.00 (USD)
PAGES 160

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Average rating from 6 members


Featured Reviews

First of all, I had no idea Benito Juarez spent any time in New Orleans in the 1850s. Second of all, I had no idea a poetic historical fiction theorized telling of his 18 month stint there could pack such a punch. I realized this book was written in Spanish about a third of the way through, and I am absolutely astounded at the translation done by Yuri Herrera’s long time collaborator, Lisa Dillman. The translation was so clever and playful and I wish I could read Spanish so I could read this in the original Spanish. Poetic but immensely readable, weird but accessible, short and sweet. I am immediately downloading the rest of Herrera’s oeuvre.

For fans Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Lauren Groff when she dabbles in historical fiction, Joan Didion’s South West, swamps, delirious hazes, and perusing the nominees for the Booker Prize for Translated Literature each year.

Thank you to Greywolf Press and Netgalley for the ARC!

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Yuri Herrera is one of the finest working writers today, and Season of the Swamp is no exception. A fictionalized retelling of the time Benito Juarez spent in New Orleans, Herrera's sentences sing, and this novel left a lasting impression on me. Thanks to the publisher for the egalley.

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