Last Date in El Zapotal

Mateo García Elizondo (Mexico City, 1987) is a screenwriter and author, and grandson of legendary Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. His work has appeared in magazines such as Nexos , Revista Casa de las Américas , Quimera, Origami, and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos . He has written scripts for film and graphic narrative, including the screenplay for the feature film Desierto (2015), which won the FIPRESCI prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. His debut novel, Last Date in El Zapotal, won the City of Barcelona Award for fiction written in Spanish. In 2021 he was listed by Granta magazine as one of the world's best writers in Spanish under thirty-five years of age. García Elizondo is also a celebrated actor, appearing in films such as Tótem (2023), which received rave reviews from both The Guardian and The New York Times .Robin Myers is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M.; The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón; and A Whale is a Country and In Vitro, both by Isabel Zapata. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry ,Yale Review ,The Drift , Poetry London, and elsewhere; her essays, in Los Angeles Review of Books , Words Without Borders , and Latin American Literature Today .

"Stunning... An instant classic." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"Elizondo García is carving his own path at the forefront of a burgeoning scene in Spanish language literature." —The Guardian"Imagine Leaving Las Vegas set in Mexico….Mateo García Elizondo’s prose is filled with gallows humor and imagistic surprises." —NPR.org"One of the most promising first novels to be published recently in Spanish." —La Vanguardia"A hypnotic odyssey through the dark depths of the soul and of Mexico." —Le Monde"We experience Last Date in El Zapotal in the body, but it hunkers down in the mind. Pretending not to feel implicated upon reading this first novel is useless, just one more hallucination." —Gatopardo"‘I came to El Zapotal to die once and for all.’ These are the words with which Mateo García Elizondo opens his literary debut entitled Last Date in El Zapotal (Anagrama, 2019). A novel that from the outset evokes the beginning of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and which as it develops suggests references to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947)." —apolorama.com"García Elizondo, with an accomplished literary and creative oeuvre at such a young age, offers in this his first novel such an attractive narrative that readers will remember his name and look forward to his future publications." —El diario vasco"Writing of a crafted, expressive intensity that recounts the hellish and tormenting passage of a being who moves between life and death in a visionary climax, in this novel of excess that unfolds in a dark fog." —El ideal gallego"Last Date in El Zapotal describes this descent into hell with a language that creates images of enormous expressive intensity and deftly resolves this story in Zapotal, where the protagonist will encounter ‘a reflection of the isolation and emptiness inside me’." —El diario vasco"Last Date in El Zapotal encompasses the evils of our time: violence, weariness, unease and oblivion." —El Informador MX"The whispers of language trap the reader in the webs of rumours that provide an inquiring keenness to a narrator who is ‘dead in life’ (…) The power of this dying enunciation is everything in this fiction. A problematic, phantasmatic, strangely accurate enunciation that gives an account of how the dead speak, what the bardo is, or how life is lived in a dead-end town, a town that ‘The whispers of language trap the reader in the webs of rumours that provide an inquiring keenness to a narrator who is ‘dead in life’ (…) The power of this dying enunciation is everything in this fiction. A problematic, phantasmatic, strangely accurate enunciation that gives an account of how the dead speak, what the bardo is, or how life is lived in a dead-end town, a town that ‘is just a reflection of the isolation and emptiness inside me’." —El periódico