Animal Spiral

Luis Othoniel Rosa is a Puerto Rican writer from Bayamón. He studied at the University of Puerto Rico and holds a PhD from Princeton University, and his work engages with questions of literature, politics and form.Katie Marya is the author of Sugar Work , the Editor's Choice for the 2020 Alice James Book Award, and the translator of Luis Othoniel Rosa's novel Animal Spiral (2026). She has been awarded the James Dickey Prize in Poetry from Five Points and support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Murray State University.

"In the tradition of the civilizational sagas of Isaac Asimov, and Kim Stanley Robinson, Rosa’s novel contemplates a future in which the collective replaces the individual as the locus of our most intimate desires and fears." —Jeff Lawrence , author of THE ANXIETIES OF EXPERIENCE: THE LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS FROM WHITMAN TO BOLAÑO "Healing, regenerative, and indispensable, Luis Othoniel Rosa’s Animal Spiral is a brilliant delirium of a novel, an ecstatic catalyst for radical reimaginings, a decolonizing masterpiece of trembling and touch. Probing our most fundamental sociopolitical assumptions to shatter the shackles of petrocolonialism and misogyny, Animal Spiral births a lush new world." —Joy Castro , author of ONE BRILLIANT FLAME "Animal Spiral is a phenomenon of nature, exploring ways of narrating the collective experience of the species – and the possibilities of a new literary form." —Bazar Americano"One of the most brilliant young writers of our time." —Marta Aponte Alsina , author of LA MUERTE FELIZ DE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS "A master work capable of redeeming a broken world." —Carlos Fonseca , author of AUSTRAL "Good fiction, transcendent fiction, the kind that burns, seems to have only two ways to escape irrelevance: to weave a narrative about nothingness or to embark on the adventure of telling everything. Animal Spiral raises its monumental, spiralling architecture on the shoulders of the latter path. From the ruins of our capitalist, colonial world, he gives birth to something new, hopeful and cruel, complex, contradictory, courageous." —Sebastián Martínez Daniell , author of TWO SHERPAS "Something is happening in Puerto Rico. In a world that the powerful insist on subjugating, critical and unbridled imagination rises up. This is not just another narrative of the end of the world, but rather its continuation by other means. With a wild, delirious intelligence, Animal Spiral is a visionary work of fiction that seeks to construct, on the basis of carnal and complete connection, a beyond that flourishes in collectivity and the death of the individual." —Cristina Rivera Garza , author of NO ONE WILL SEE ME CRY "Animal Spiral takes readers on a ride from the roots of human consciousness to modernity and beyond (…). More than science fiction, Animal Spiral is speculative anarchism with shades of Luisa Capetillo, William Burroughs and Octavia Butler." —Dr. Michael Cucher