Miguel Ángel Hernández with Bécquer Seguín: THE PAIN OF OTHERS

In this blend of police thriller and poignant autofiction, a writer revisits a tragic crime from his adolescence and reckons with a dark, underexplored side of Spain. Professor Bécquer Seguín from Johns Hopkins University will join Hernández in conversation.

About the book, recently released in the U.S. from Other Press:

On Christmas Eve 1995, Miguel Ángel Hernández's best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. It happened in a small hamlet in the Murcia countryside. No one ever knew why. The investigation was closed, and the crime forgotten.

20 years later, when the wounds seem to have stopped bleeding and the mourning died down, Miguel decides to return to the countryside and, putting himself in the shoes of a detective, tries to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But travelling in time always means altering the past, and the investigation will awaken ghosts that he thought he had left behind: a childhood marked by the Church, by sin and guilt; the constant presence of illness and death; the oppressive, closed world from which he managed to escape.

This raw, moving novel about the collision of two worlds and two ways of life is a reckoning with the past and, above all, a subtle and incisive meditation on the ethics of literature, which makes us aware that "writing isn't always a triumph, that sometimes, we too may founder upon the pain of others."

Order THE PAIN OF OTHERS here!

Miguel Ángel Hernández (Murcia, Spain, 1977) is a Spanish writer and professor of Art History at the University of Murcia. He is the author of several novels and essays on contemporary art and visual culture. His novels include Intento de escapada (2013), winner of the Ciudad de Alcalá Prize, and El instante de peligro (2015), finalist for the Herralde Prize. His work has been translated into several languages. His book The Pain of Others, published in English by Other Press, was selected as a Book of the Year by El País and The New York Times en Español and is currently being adapted for film. His novel Anoxia was also published in English by Other Press.

Bécquer Seguín is an associate professor of Spanish literature at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain. Since 2015, he has regularly covered Spanish politics and culture for The Nation, Slate, LARB, and other publications.

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