I Met My Literary Hero

A Friday personal update

Welcome to Coffee Break Friday, where I give quick personal updates and offer tips to new editors.

Freelancing While Sick?

I was sick this week. Proper in-bed-with-the-chills sick. This is the second time I’ve gotten sick while freelancing, and I’d like to highlight the differences between the two occasions in the hope that it’s helpful to fellow freelancers:

The first time I got sick, during my first few months of freelancing, I was in the middle of editing a novel for a publisher. Rather than ask for an extension, I edited while I had strep throat. Folks: I made mistakes. You cannot copyedit sick. When I apologized to the publisher, I was told I should have informed them, as they would have granted me an extension. It hadn’t even dawned on me to ask for this. (Note: The publisher rehired me for future jobs. There is mercy in this world.)

This time, I asked for the extension and was quickly granted it. I tried to imagine editing while feverish and was mostly just glad I hadn’t bothered trying. Sick copyeditors have no business handling other people’s precious manuscripts.

A Short Ode to Audiobooks

Audiobooks are an incredible antidote to suffering. While I was shivering in bed, I played an audiobook—The Monster’s Bones by David K. Randall—and was teleported far away, accompanying the world’s first paleontologists as they dug through the American Midwest and climbed cliffsides, wrestled octopuses, and faced down mountain lions in South America. Way more fun than being stuck in bed.

If you, too, want to know the soap opera behind how the American Museum of Natural History got its dinosaur collection, I highly recommend The Monster’s Bones.

The perfect audiobook

Meeting Álvaro Enrigue

I’m currently learning Spanish, and one of the many reasons why is to read the books of Álvaro Enrigue, a Mexican author who’s lived in New York for far too long for so many of his books to still be untranslated. His book Sudden Death, released in English in 2016, is one of my favorite novels of all time.

Summary:

The poet and the artist battle it out in Rome before a crowd that includes Galileo, a Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw the world into flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into those most-sought-after tennis balls. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history. In a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that it’s a manual instead of a parody. And in today’s New York City, a man searches for answers to impossible questions, for a book that is both an archive and an oracle.

Enrigue sat on a panel for an event at the McNally Jackson bookstore this month, and I went to see him. He was accompanied by his translator Natasha Wimmer and the novelist Francine Prose. I loved hearing all three of them talk. They were there to discuss the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, who’s most famous for 2666 and whose shorter works were recently re-released in English.

Some highlights from the event:

• Francine Prose said that she would love to teach a class on “evil in literature” featuring only three books: 2666, Moby-Dick, and Gravity’s Rainbow. (But she knows she can’t make students read this much in one semester.)

• Enrigue joked that he’s the only Mexican writer of his generation who never met Bolaño.

• The translator Natasha Wimmer discussed at length how Bolaño traveled across South America and Spain throughout his life and wrote in a fluid, cosmopolitan Spanish—having Argentinian characters use Chilean slang, for example, for no particular reason—but that this was impossible to convey in the English translation.

• Enrigue mentioned in passing that the key to 20th-century Latin American literature is Borges. Maybe this is obvious to a student of Spanish-language lit, but the matter-of-fact way he said it surprised me.

• He signed my book and my friend’s book, and he drew a different animal in both of them, which I thought was cute. She got a wolf, and I got a lil’ pig:

Enrigue’s latest book in English is called You Dreamed of Empires, and I’m very happy to see that a new book of his will also be released in 2026 (Now I Surrender to You and That Is All. You can already read it in Spanish—Ahora me rindo y eso es todo was released in 2018).

You Dreamed of Empires, US and UK covers

That’s All For Now

After the event, nearly everyone went downstairs, where we were told the writers would meet with us to talk further. My friend and I lingered in the upstairs reading room, though, so that we could ask Enrigue to sign our books.

“Sorry for keeping you,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “You’re saving me from all the people down there.”

I hadn’t expected someone I read about in Vogue to be so relatable.

Until next time,

Hannah Varacalli

Copy & Developmental Editor
www.hveditorial.com