Ramifications

Daniel Saldaña París is a poet, essayist and novelist born in Mexico City in 1984. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary Mexican literature. His debut novel Among Strange Victims (En medio de extrañas víctimas, 2013) was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award and Ramifications (El nervio principal, 2018), his second novel, has brought him even more praise and admiration in Mexico and abroad. He has two poetry collections and his work has been included in several anthologies, including México20: New Voices, Old Traditions (Pushkin Press, 2015). In 2017, he was chosen as one of the Hay Festival’s Bogotá39, a selection of the best Latin American writers under forty. He has been a writer in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Omi International Center for the Arts, MALBA and Banff Center.Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator, working mainly in the areas of Latin American fiction, essays, poetry, and hybrid texts. She has translated works by such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez and Elvira Navarro. She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published shorter translations, articles, interviews and collaborations on a wide variety of platforms. Her most recent translations are Jazmina Barrera’s Cross-Stitch (shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Institute Translation Prize) and Clyo Mendoza’s Fury. In 2024, she was granted a Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s The Company.

Dublin Literary Award (Longlist)"[S]trange and elegant. . . . París brilliantly explores memory, masculinity, and familial drama in equal measure. The result is an affecting account of arrested development." —Publishers Weekly"A Dostoyevskian tale set in the Mexico City of today." —Kirkus"Ramifications grapples with the earnest naivety of one experiencing trauma far too young." —New Statesman"Saldaña París excels at imbuing his earnest protagonist's effort to write himself free from his memories with levity, which MacSweeney — a highly gifted translator who seems to specialize in voice-driven and tonally complex books — conveys beautifully." —NPR.org"Saldaña París brilliantly folds this story into itself, deftly dissolving time and reality, while constructing an intricate, intimate origami of heartbreak, dark humor, familial fractures and profound dispossession." —Tanaïs , author of BRIGHT LINES"Saldaña París is the Mexican Philip Roth." —Ottessa Moshfegh , author of EILEEN"Daniel Saldaña París knows how to talk about those other tragedies populating daily life: a boring, unwanted marriage; mind-numbing office work; family secrets. He builds on those bricks of tedium a greatly enjoyable and splendidly well-written suburban farce." —Yuri Herrera , author of KINGDOM CONS"Ramifications is a masterful and devastating fairy tale about the particular loneliness of a child lost in the woods of machismo and social revolts." —Alejandro Zambra , author of BONSÁI and WAYS OF GOING HOME"A deft examination on the nature of truth." —The Skinny"Paced like a detective thriller, this slim novel contains hard-boiled meditations on masculinity, personal responsibility and the plasticity of memory." —Seattle Times"In Daniel Saldaña París’s resonant novel Ramifications, an eventful summer has ripple effects that last decades. . . . a rich, smart, and satisfying rendering of abandonment and loss, whose effects reverberate through time." —Foreword Reviews"[A] sinister little book suffused with a biting humor and morbid curiosity. " —Uriel Perez, BookPeople"A captivating novel by one of the most important figures in contemporary Mexican literature." —Morning Star"the reader is drawn into an almost memoir-like story, interjecting snippets of real-time Mexican history with the dreamlike quality of being stuck within a house." —Sounds & Colours"When the revelation arrives, it comes as a punch in the guts, one the reader feels as much as the narrator does." —Tony's Reading List************Praise for Daniel Saldaña ParísEccles Centre and Hay Festival Writers Award Winner"Brief, brilliantly written, and kissed by a sense of the absurd. . . . Like a much lazier, Mexico City version of Dostoevsky's Underground Man ." —NPR Fresh Air"Great fun are the jabs at academia, Mexico City and the dusty town where the action, or inaction, moves after Rodrigo meets Marcelo, a Spanish cretin with a Ph.D. in aesthetics. These flameless flaneurs humph and hump, personifying urban malaise." —New York Times Sunday Book Review"Full of odd twists and surprises. Among the high points are Saldana Paris' exasperated but affectionate paeans to 'the immense, beautiful city' that is Mexico's capital. Though a study of slothfulness and its discontents, a welcome book on which the author has clearly expended energy." —Kirkus"The novel takes some bizarre turns as Marcelo leads Rodrigo into experiments involving drugs, tequila, hypnosis and more, all in the name of transformation. If the young man's notion of radical change is to take part in his life rather than observe it from afar, he's off to a good start."—New York Times"Saldana Paris's first novel to be translated Stateside is a leisurely story of slacking off that's nicely conveyed in a sharp, cynical tone. . . . Read this messy, shaggy picaresque for its ample page-by-page pleasures, which include devilishly clever syntax, a charming tendency to digress, and satisfying flashes of Rodrigo and Marcelo getting their act together." —Publishers Weekly"For all Saldana Paris' sharp wit, Among Strange Victims is about waking up to the world's brighter possibilities." —NPR