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Copies of arrived in the office on Friday, so we’re finally able to All the information about the contest is below, but first, a bit about about the book itself, starting with the greatest blurb we’ve ever included on the front of one of our titles:

���Ĵ�ý�Carlos Labbé���Ĵ�ý�s [Navidad & Matanza] begins to fuck with your head from its very first word���Ĵ�ý�moving through journalese, financial reporting, whodunit, Joseph Conrad, Raymond Chandler, Nabokov to David Lynch.���Ĵ�ý����Ĵ�ý�Toby Litt

Even putting aside the very compelling statement that this book is going to “fuck with your head from its very first word,” that’s quite a line-up of influences . . . All of which are completely accurate.

This isn’t an easy book to describe—there are a few related storylines, one involving scientists making a drug of hate, and another about their attempt to play a “novel-game” in which they take turns creating a story (a game that Labbé actually played and that we’ll post more about later), which all ties into the disappearance of two children . . . Here’s my best attempt at formally describing this novel:

It���Ĵ�ý�s the summer of 1999 when the two children of wealthy video game executive Jose Francisco Vivar, Alicia and Bruno, go missing in the beach town of Matanza. Long after their disappearance, the people of Matanza and the adjacent town of Navidad consistently report sightings of Bruno���Ĵ�ý�on the beach, in bars, gambling���Ĵ�ý�while reports on Alicia, however, are next to none. And every clue keeps circling back to a man named Boris Real . . .

At least that���Ĵ�ý�s how the story���Ĵ�ý�or one of many stories, rather���Ĵ�ý�goes. All of them are told by a journalist narrator, who recounts the mysterious case of the Vivar family from an underground laboratory where he and six other ���Ĵ�ý�subjects���Ĵ�ý� have taken up a novel-game, writing and exchanging chapters over email, all while waiting for the fear-inducing drug hadón to take its effect, and their uncertain fates.

A literary descendent of Roberto Bolaño and Andrés Neuman, Carlos Labbé���Ĵ�ý�s Navidad & Matanza is a work of metafiction that not only challenges our perceptions of facts and observations, and of identity and reality, but also of basic human trust.

For the Spanish literature obsessed out there, you may recognize Carlos Labbé’s name from Granta’s special “Young Spanish-Language Novelists” issue from a couple years back. but an excerpt from this book was in there. (But in Natasha Wimmer’s translation.)

If you missed that issue, you can read an where you can also just pre-order the book if you don’t want to fool around with this GoodReads contest stuff.

But if you are up for trying to win a free copy, here’s how you enter:

Contest closes on February 10th, so enter today!