The Things We've Seen

Echoes, implosions and coincidences soon make us feel we are circulating in a single space-time of displacements and substitutions. Shapes, for example, repeat in different scales or contexts: the reservoir in Central Park has the outline of Iberia. The most bravura example of this form of paranoia signs everywhere is given to a Dal avatar who establishes a connection between the Twin Towers, the twin girls in the corridor of The Shining, the two columns of the pause icon on a screen, and (the narrators later input) a line in one of Lorcas New York poems. It stays with you. Lorna Scott Fox, New Left Review Mallos imagination never falters. To stay with him means loosening all limitations we might wish to impose on a text. The reward is an audacious adventure.... This is, indeed, a dream of a book. Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing youll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolao another. Agustn Fernndez Mallo has become one, too. This novel, which ranges across the world and beyond it, is hugely ambitious in scope. Its a weird, recursive, paranoiac, funny, menacing and thrilling book. Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man Charmingly voracious and guided by fanatical precision and wit, Mallo ties the loose threads of the world together into intricate, charismatic knots. This is the expansive, omnivorous sort of novel that threatens to show you every thought youve ever had in a new and effervescent light, along with so many others you couldnt have dreamed. Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations Some great works create worlds from which to look back at ourselves and recalibrate; The Things Weve Seen takes the world as it is and plays it back through renewed laws of physics. Rarely has a novel left me with such new eyes, an X-ray view of the present. DBC Pierre, author of Meanwhile in Dopamine City The most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain. Mathias Enard, author of Compass The Things Weve Seen confirms Fernndez Mallo as one of the best writers in Spanish, with an absolutely unique style and fictional world. Jorge Carrin, New York Times in Spanish A strange and original sensibility at work one that combines a deep commitment to the possibilities of art with a gonzo spirit and a complete absence of pretention. Christopher Beha, Harpers

Agustn Fernndez Mallo was born in La Corua in 1967, and is a qualified physicist. In 2000 he formulated a self-termed theory of post-poetry which explores connections between art and science. His Nocilla Trilogy, published between 2006 and 2009, brought about an important shift in contemporary Spanish writing and paved the way for the birth of a new generation of authors, known as the Nocilla Generation. His essay Postpoesa: hacia un nuevo paradigma was shortlisted for the Anagrama Essay Prize in 2009. In 2018 his long essay Teora general de la basura (cultura, apropiacin, complejidad) was published by Galaxia Gutenberg, and in the same year his latest novel, The Things Weve Seen, won the Biblioteca Breve Prize.