God Is Round

Juan Villoro is Mexico’s most prolific, prize-winning author, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. His books have been translated into multiple languages; he has received the Herralde Award in Spain for his novel El testigo, the Antonin Artaud award in France for Los culpables. His novel, Arrecife, was recently short-listed for the Rezzori Prize in Italy. Villoro lives in Mexico City and is a visiting lecturer at Yale and Princeton universities.Thomas Bunstead's translations from the Spanish include work by Eduardo Halfon and Yuri Herrera, Aixa de la Cruz's story “True Milk” in Best of European Fiction, and the forthcoming A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas (a co-translation with Anne McLean). A guest editor of a Words Without Borders feature on Mexico (March 2015), Thomas has also published his own writing in the Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, the Paris Review blog, 3ammagazine, Days of Roses, readysteadybook, and >kill author.

“The best football writer you've never heard of…. Juan Villoro, Mexico’s foremost man of letters, captures the beautiful game to perfection…. Juan Villoro is one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters. A renowned novelist, short-story writer and translator into Spanish of authors as diverse as Graham Greene, Goethe and Truman Capote, Villoro has shown... his Borgesian range of being as at home with D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats as he is with the Hispanic canon. Unlike Borges, who loathed the game, Villoro is also one of the best writers on football in the world. Early on in this remarkable collection of essays, Villoro sets out his stall as a writer of sport…. Villoro is as adept on the vagaries of the game as he is in his psychoanalysis of its players. His essay on Diego Armando Maradona — with the Tolstoyan title ‘Life, Death, Resurrection and a Little More Besides’ — is a masterful portrait of the game’s greatest player…. In successfully marrying his love of literature and football, Villoro has demonstrated the first principle of sports writing, or any good writing for that matter.”—Andreas Campomar, The Spectator