Lost Empress
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
