The Dance and the Fire

In a gripping new novel by acclaimed Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París, three friends forever bound by erotic flames of the past reunite in a city engulfed by wildfires and an ecstatic dancing plague.

After years apart, three high school friends return to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where an intense love triangleleft an indelible mark on their adolescence. The city, claustrophobic as wildfires press closer, reawakens the past and confronts them with their present: the entanglement of friendship and desire, the seemingly distant discovery of sexuality, complex parental relationships, and the daunting task of artistic fulfilment.

In the background, forces of chaos and destruction are a constant presence. As fires ravage the physical landscape, one of the friends begins choreographing an ecstatic dance inspired by the German Expressionist Mary Wigman and medieval Danse Macabre. What starts as a coping mechanism for the anxieties of disappearing youth and climate catastrophe becomes an overpowering, all-consuming hysteria. Mysterious powers are awakened, the boundary between reality and myth begins to blur, and the friends find themselves immersed in an increasingly turbulent and uncertain universe.

Daniel Saldaña París is a poet, essayist and novelist born in Mexico City in 1984. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary Mexican literature. His debut novel Among Strange Victims (En medio de extrañas víctimas, 2013) was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award and Ramifications (El nervio principal, 2018), his second novel, has brought him even more praise and admiration in Mexico and abroad. He has two poetry collections and his work has been included in several anthologies, including México20: New Voices, Old Traditions (Pushkin Press, 2015). In 2017, he was chosen as one of the Hay Festival’s Bogotá39, a selection of the best Latin American writers under forty. He has been a writer in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Omi International Center for the Arts, MALBA and Banff Center.

Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator, working mainly in the areas of Latin American fiction, essays, poetry, and hybrid texts. She has translated works by such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez and Elvira Navarro. She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published shorter translations, articles, interviews and collaborations on a wide variety of platforms. Her most recent translations are Jazmina Barrera’s Cross-Stitch (shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Institute Translation Prize) and Clyo Mendoza’s Fury. In 2024, she was granted a Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s The Company.