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About Blue Label
Product Description “One part Scheherazade, two parts Boccaccio, a twist of Bolaño, and a dash of bitters. Blue Label is intoxicating, hilarious, and the best novel on the calamity that is today’s Venezuela.”―Carmen Boullosa "This deftly and idiomatically translated novel . . . a quest of sorts, as a high school student in Chávez's Venezuela tries to make sense of love and life . . . packs a punch on many levels: personal, political, and even mythic." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraqueñan and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. She embarks on a spontaneous road trip in a banged-up Fiat with her rebellious classmate Luis Tévez, in search of her grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. While Eugenia and Luis’s tentative, troubled romance unfolds during the Chávez era, the story also looks back at Venezuela’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that led to Chávez’s election. With an unvarnished fluidity that brings to mind Jack Kerouac and a crazy-ass playlist that ranges from REM to Bob Dylan to El Canto del Loco to Shakira, Blue Label is an audacious, dark novel with a gut-punch of an ending; the prize-winning first book by a writer who has cemented his reputation as a major young Latin American voice. Review “A high-octane experience, an irreverent assault on the senses that breaks conventions.” ―Federico Vegas, El Nacional “ Blue Label is a dramatic edifice whose inhabitants, one by one, abandon their place within it to seek solitude and oblivion. It is one of the best novels by a young writer I have read in recent times.” ―Alfonso Molina, author of Ideas of Babel “Sánchez Rugeles has created an uninhibited, adolescent female voice, a character who not only narrates but also provides a rich, raw speech map . . . of a generation whose destiny lies elsewhere.” ―Alberto Barrera Tyszka, from the Afterword “Like the verbal equivalent of a good whisky, Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’s novel should be savored with an urgency that evokes calmness, read in small sips to avoid wasting any of it, the consummate narrative. All that remains is to put your hands on a copy, raise it like a glass, and drink it down to the last drop." ―Rodrigo Blanco Calderón “ Blue Label is a wickedly well-written novel, with electric prose that delivers one jolt after another, a subtle and joyful sense of humor, an intoxicating infectiousness, a complex character about whom we want to know everything, and an ending that leaves the reader with a feeling of emptiness or sweet melancholy. It’s a book we’ll be talking about for years to come.” ―Daniel Saldaña París About the Author Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (Caracas, 1977) is a fiction writer, screenwriter, and teacher. He has published five novels: Blue Label/Etiqueta Azul (2010), winner of the Arturo Uslar Pietri award for Latin American literature and shortlisted for the Critics Award of Venezuela; Transylvania, Unplugged (2011), shortlisted for the Arturo Uslar Pietri award for Latin American literature; Liubliana (2012), honorable mention, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Bicentennial Literary Award, and winner of the Critics Award of Venezuela; Jezebel (2013); and Julián (2014). He presently lives in Madrid. Paul Filev is a Melbourne-based literary translator and editor. He translates from Macedonian and Spanish. He was awarded a Literary Translation Fellowship by Dalkey Archive Press in 2015. His translations from Macedonian include Vera Bužarovska’s The Last Summer in the Old Bazaar (Saguaro Books, 2015) and Sasho Dimoski’s Alma Mahler (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018).
