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| photo: Picky Talarico | |
Javier Fuentes is a Spanish American writer and a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow. He earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where he was a teaching fellow. Born in Barcelona, he lives in New York. His first novel, Countries of Origin (Pantheon, June 6, 2023), is set over one summer in 2007, when star pastry chef Demetrio's lack of papers finally catches up with him.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
An undocumented queer pastry chef leaves New York to find his homeland, becomes a flâneur, ends up finding himself.
On your nightstand now:
The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore; La Mala Costumbre by Alana S. Portero (English translation forthcoming from HarperVia in 2024); The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard; The Final Voicemails: Poems by Max Ritvo; melatonin gummies.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Tintin in Tibet.
Your top five authors:
Let's rephrase it: top five authors you go back to again and again.
Javier Marías. A literary titan who demonstrated it is possible to write literary novels and, at the same time, reach a wide array of audiences across countries and cultures.
Rachel Cusk, whose novels are like a comfy room you never want to leave.
Italo Calvino, who left a body of work so multilayered that reading it is like looking through a glass, constantly changing.
Carmen Martín Gaite. A writer who helped me understand the Spain I grew up in and women like my mother.
James Purdy, an author ahead of his time. He committed his life to writing about outsiders and, by doing so, became himself, unjustly, an outsider in the literary world.
Book you've faked reading:
The Bible.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Mina Stone: Cooking for Artists. Simple Greek recipes even self-absorbed writers can prepare without burning down the house.
Book you've bought for the cover:
(AND the title)
A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham.
I just noticed there are two covers, but I am referring to the one from the first edition. It is a black-and-white photo of the author, their face covered with a beautiful grid of colors, textures, and parts of the body. Puzzling and soothing.
Book you hid from your parents:
Thankfully, I never had to hide books from my parents, though I did conceal many letters from my best friend who, it then became clear, was my first homosexual love.
Book that changed your life:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I remember being a teenager in Madrid and my mom telling me the story of when she first read it. A friend had smuggled a copy from Paris, because it was banned in Spain during the dictatorship. A great story that instantly made me want to get my hands on it and made reading it even more thrilling, if that is possible.
Favorite line from a book:
"To dream the impossible dream, that is my quest." From Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. A line that brilliantly captures who the protagonist is and serves as a beacon for the story to come.
Five books you'll never part with:
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; Orlando by Virginia Woolf; Coin Locker Babies by Ryū Murakami; On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry; Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. No other book has ever provided such solace in times of loss.