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Summary
Summary
From the acclaimed PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize-winning author of A Naked Singularity, a shockingly hilarious novel that tackles, with equal aplomb, both America's most popular sport and its criminal justice system
From Paterson, New Jersey, to Rikers Island to the streets of New York City, Sergio de la Pava's Lost Empress introduces readers to a cast of characters unlike any other in modern fiction: dreamers and exiles, immigrants and night-shift workers, a lonely pastor and others on the fringes of society--each with their own impact on the fragile universe they navigate.
Nina Gill, daughter of the aging owner of the Dallas Cowboys, was instrumental in building her father's dynasty. So it's a shock when her brother inherits the franchise and she is left with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey's failing Indoor Football League team. Nina vows to take on the NFL and make the Paterson Pork pigskin kings of America. All she needs to do is recruit the coach, the players, and the fans.
Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles--a brilliant and lethal criminal mastermind--has been imprisoned on Rikers Island for a sensational offense. Nuno fights for his liberty--while simultaneously planning an even more audacious crime.
In Lost Empress, de la Pava weaves a narrative that encompasses Salvador Dalí, Joni Mitchell, psychiatric help, emergency medicine, religion, theoretical physics, and everything in between. With grace, humor, and razor-sharp prose, all these threads combine, counting down to an epic and extraordinary conclusion.
Author Notes
SERGIO DE LA PAVA is the author of A Naked Singularity and Personae . He is a public defender in New York City.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his extraordinary new novel, de la Pava (A Naked Singularity) weaves together several story lines centered around Paterson, N.J. Nina Gill is a preternaturally gifted football strategist. She stands to inherit the Dallas Cowboys, but instead ends up with the family's far less desirable Indoor Football League franchise, the Paterson Pork. However, an NFL lockout gives Nina the opportunity to build an absurd alternative for showcasing the sport she loves. A few miles from Paterson, Nuno DeAngeles sits imprisoned in Rikers Island. An out-of-place intellectual, Nuno is able to manipulate his lawyer and eventually lands in the somewhat cushier Bellevue Hospital while he conspires with his fellow inmate Solomon to commit a mysterious crime. Between these two worlds, de la Pava takes readers into the lives of ordinary Patersonians who work as EMTs, 911 operators, and a pig-suit-wearing mascot. Like his previous work, de la Pava's novel employs a variety of narrative forms, including legal briefs, sermons, phone transcripts, and the text of a prison handbook. De la Pava is a maximalist worldbuilder, and the incredible multiverse he constructs in this book establishes him as one of the most fearsomely talented American novelists working today. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* De la Pava's (Personae, 2013) latest novel mashes up tales of urban hardship and injustice in a jaunty farce about an upstart football league, inviting reflection on outsiderness. Nuno, a hyperverbal intellectual with a penchant for violent crime, festers in Bellevue and Rikers Island, waxing philosophical when he isn't manipulating his defense attorney or yearning for his teenage crush, the student-loan-encumbered Dia Nouveau. Dia has her hands full with her new job working for Nina Gill, the unstoppable new commissioner of the Indoor Football League, whose ragbag Paterson Pork franchise will take on the Dallas Cowboys for national dominance. Meanwhile, the people of Paterson, New Jersey, including world-weary prison guards and 911 operators, hardworking immigrants, and aged shut-ins, scrape by, their lives drenched with loss but also connected in profound ways. As with the author's debut novel, A Naked Singularity (2012), the New York City criminal-justice system figures prominently, its jargon and bureaucratic instruments providing realist texture, while its absurdities and cruelties fuel the fury that is this novel's molten core. Again we witness de la Pava's gleaming wit, philosophical benders and pop-culture fixations, and the sheer intensity with which he hurls his words in this even more assured work of incandescent literary maximalism. And the underdog triumphs again.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2018 Booklist
Kirkus Review
If Thomas Pynchon and Elmore Leonard had conspired to write North Dallas Forty, this might be the result: a madcap, football-obsessed tale of crossed destinies and criminal plots gone awry.You know you're in fictional territory when the Dallas Cowboys are portrayed as a winning team; the world is veritably upside down when things like that happen. That's one of many conceits de la Pava (Personae, 2011, etc.), New York City public defender by day and shaper of the modern canon by night, plays with in this loopy yarn, which embraces surrealist art, the law, theoretical physics, politics, and just about everything else under the sun. But especially football: At the heart of de la Pava's shaggy dog tale, overlong but not overworked, is an unabashed love for pigskin. Young Nina Gill hauls up the underdog Paterson Pork team from deepest obscurity in a scenario out of a gridiron version of King Lear after having been shoved aside from inheriting said Cowboys after her father dies; in grim revenge, Nina decides to take the indoor-playing Pork to the NFL championship, an impossibility, of course. She's an encyclopedia of the game: "Before 'seventy-eight defensive backs could hit receivers with impunity all the way down the field provided the ball hadn't been thrown," she tells sidekick Dia Nouveau, who's scrambling to keep up with "the various permutations of football knowledge that woman is essentially compelling her to acquire." Dia has bigger fish to fry, though, and so does Nuno DeAngeles, street philosopher and would-be crime lord, who's gotten himself tucked away on Rikers Island and finds that his "only ally now is Ren Descartes," inasmuch as Cartesian dualism allows his mind to flow freely out into the boroughs to work mischief until his body can catch up. Parts of the story are seemingly the standard aspirational sports rah-rah, but turned on their head, and the caper that plays out alongside Nina's championship run, laced with philosophy and cornerbacks, is a blast to watch unfold.A whirling vortex of a novel, confusing, misdirecting, and surprisingand a lot of fun. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Set mainly in Paterson, NJ, and on New York's Rikers Island, this multifaceted tour de force from De La Pava (A Naked Singularity) waxes both hilarious and tragic in equal measure as it oscillates among several fascinating and interrelated characters. Football genius Nina Gill, witty scion of NFL aristocracy, the new owner of the Indoor Football League's (IFL) Paterson Pork, is using the IFL to challenge the dominance of the NFL. She is joined by Dia Nouveau, her sidekick and also the former partner of Nuno DeAngeles, currently incarcerated at Rikers. Sharon Seaborg is a 911 operator, haunted by her experiences, whose handling of the call from a fatal accident provides a tragic counterpoint to the more comic aspect of Nina's and Dia's shenanigans. Sharon's ex-husband, Hugh, a guard at Rikers, and a slew of other minor characters add leavening. Sprinkled throughout are supporting metatextual materials including a 911 transcript and a Rikers Island Inmate Rule Book, as well as relevant medical and legal documents. Verdict De La Pava's compelling narrative poses some deep questions, e.g, Can some murders be justifiable? And can the Paterson Pork prevail against the NFL? The result is a powerful statement about values; highly recommended.-Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Because it will remain true, even then: that we will only see before affect after, only sense the immediate, and dumbly feed on the invisible other. And in 2042 a woman with indeterminately colored eyes will suffer the first known case of mass reverse amnesia (codified thereafter and for the first time in DSM-XI). Meaning she will one day wake to find that while her perception of her surroundings is unchanged, she's now perfect stranger to all who knew her. This absence of external recognition both perfect and consistent. She will look in mirrors. It will still look like her; will still be her, right? She will move through confusion and space. Her head will hurt as if from a blow. Everything will look the same but nothing will cohere into meaning. Yet this absence of meaning will clearly apply to her alone. The clockwork of the world will continue to grind forward and she will more and more feel like disinterested observer. Although there will be freedom too. Because if no one knows who you are today that means no one knows who you were. Magnifying greatly the power of self-reinvention inherent in something like starting a new job or moving to a new school. Also the freedom that comes from realizing it may all just be a game. After all, if you can wake one day to find you've been converted into a complete unknown, then it seems fair to posit that, when it comes to existence, really anything at all is in play. She'll agonize, through tears, about whether life is screwball comedy or soap opera, will feel like those are the only two options. But how truth could equally underpin both. Let me explain. Was Mathematics invented or discovered? Formalists (invented) and Platonists (discovered) will still not have agreed (true advancement will not come where you'd like, it will stay confined to things like pixels). Of course, the only reason the question will remain relevant is that Math will continue to be so unreasonably effective at describing the natural world. So, to take a classic example, Newton will seemingly invent calculus (some debate, Leibniz?) and others, centuries later, will discover that it accurately, to an extreme level, depicts our physical reality, which reality of course is decidedly not a Newtonian invention. See? One possible explanation is that although it felt like an invention what Newton was actually doing was discovering a truth and that's why his invention has persisted. The afflicted woman will focus intensely on this issue but ultimately conclude that Life is neither, it's endurance. Your new reality is formed hourly or even more frequently and the universe has approximately zero interest in how you feel about that fact, only what you emit in response. She will look into a still, standing body of water and address her reflected self. She will conclude that, finally, it's Beauty will destroy us all. She will, she'll decide, endure. Excerpted from Lost Empress: A Novel by Sergio De La Pava All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
