Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You
A Novel
by Julián Delgado Lopera
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Pub Date May 26 2026 | Archive Date Apr 30 2026
W. W. Norton & Company | Liveright
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Description
From the award-winning author of Fiebre Tropical, an electric, highly anticipated novel set in Colombia’s underground queer scene.
It is a known fact that the queens who refuse their destiny are haunted. Rejection turns itself inward, a bullet to the heart of said queen, and unleashes, per Travesti Lore, a river of curses.
Cloistered in a dreary Bogotá apartment, Ignacio’s light has dimmed, leaving his teenage daughter, Valentina, to raise herself in the wake of her mother Alma’s death. Lonely and love-starved, Valentina aches to discover the details of her mother’s drowning, and for her father to snap out of his depression. But Ignacio can’t. He spends listless afternoons smoking cigarettes in long blonde wigs, telenovelas humming in the background, haunted not only by matrimonial guilt, but by memories of a young man he once loved and betrayed.
From Ignacio’s tragic past emerges the luminous queen of Bogotá’s queer underground, Mamadora Eléctrica, the wise travesti who he first met under the silvery lights of Club Aquario when he was just a shy country boy. With Alma gone, Mamadora steps in as a mother figure to Valentina the way she once did for the girl’s father. But as an expert in Travesti Lore, she fears the worst: that Ignacio’s self-destruction may have unleashed a curse on them all.
From “a writer who is grinding their own colors” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is a profound and richly imagined story about coming undone.
About the Author:
Julián Delgado Lopera is the author of Fiebre Tropical, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Aspen Literary Prize, among other honors. Born and raised in Colombia, Julián teaches Creative Writing at CUNY. He lives in Brooklyn.
Advance Praise
"Every once in a while you come across a book so bursting with life that the pages seem to be sprouting, delivered in a never-heard-before idiom that must have been invented just to transmit so much aliveness. Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You is that book and Julián Delgado Lopera is one of the most exciting writers in all the Americas." -Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition, Baby
"Delgado Lopera is a writer whose sentences make your heart race, and Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You, with its unmasking of lies, makings of new truths, insights into the human heart, is generous, imaginative, revelatory, enraging, and loving. Read it and let the lightning of its prose bring you alive again." -Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
"Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You has it all: sequins and pelucas, secrets and sorrow. Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel burns with the fever of Bogotá’s queer underground while laying bare the ache of fractured families. . . . This is a work as innovative in voice as it is fearless in heart." -Alex Espinoza, author of The Sons of El Rey
"A linguistic marvel of collective consciousness." -Sarah Schulman, author of The Cosmopolitans
"A thrilling ride, not only through the farmlands and cities of Colombia, but through time’s imperfect vessel, life. . . . Julián Delgado Lopera has gifts to spare, and this classic novel is a present for us all." -Alejandro Varela, author of Middle Spoon
"A perfectly calibrated novel that captures the gritty contours of masculinity and homophobia in Colombia through lush, lyric, and irresistible prose. . . . We are braver and freer because of the novel Julián Delgado Lopera has written.
" -Ruben Reyes Jr., author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven and Archive of Unknown Universes
"A majestic and otherworldly novel of first love, longing for family and escape, and the struggle to release the ghosts we carry. . . . This novel is a torrential downpour that will leave you trembling toward your own freedom." -Santiago Jose Sanchez, author of Hombrecito
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324097204 |
| PRICE | $31.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 336 |
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