Project Description

Nocilla ProjectAgustín Fernández Mallo

Spain

Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña in 1967 and holds a degree in Physical Sciences. In 2000 he coined the term postpoetic poetry – which investigates the connections between art and science. His essays include POSTPOETRY, TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM, finalist for the Anagrama Essay Prize 2009; GENERAL THEORY OF RUBBISH, winner of the Cálamo Extraordinary Prize 2018, and THE SHAPE OF THE CROWD, winner of the 1st Eugenio Trías Essay Prize. His NOCILLA TRILOGY, which has been singled out by critics and the public as renewing Spanish literature, won the European Literature Prize 2022.
His artistic production encompasses genres that combine video art, written word, and music. Together with Eloy Fernández Porta he has developed the spoken word duo Afterpop, Fernández & Fernández; with Juan Feliu, the musical group Frida Laponia, and with Pilar Rubí the sound project Revinientes. His blog is called El hombre que salió de la tarta (“The Man Who Came Out of the Cake”). His books have been translated into more than ten languages, and critics and readers everywhere highlight their high literary quality and conceptual openness to other spaces and modes of narration.

»A landmark trilogy in contemporary Spanish literature.«
The New York Times

Agustín Fernández Mallo© Ivan Gimenez

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Atom Heart Mother

In 1967, shortly before Agustín Fernández Mallo was born, his father, a man originally from a village in León, a veterinarian by profession and a firm believer in science and progress, embarked on a pioneering journey through the United States with the aim of bringing twenty cows on a plane to Galicia. Almost half a century later, it is the author who makes his own journey through the American heartland, trying to retrace his father’s steps before the latter loses his memory.
Atom Heart Mother (“Madre de corazón atómico”) traces almost a century of Spanish history through a web of family stories and legends, about anonymous people who lived through the civil war, the post-war period, the return of democracy, and the turn of the century. As the narrator states, “life writes the fiction that we would never dare to write”.
This is the most powerful novel by the Agustín Fernández Mallo at his best; his most personal and, at the same time, most universal book, a narrative that deals with the entire human condition, and proposes to understand death not as the end of a journey, but as a beginning, the last lesson of life of a loved one.

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The Book of All Loves

When the world falls apart, only love remains.

Venice, sometime in the 21st century. Humanity is unknowingly heading towards extinction as a couple wander through the city, oblivious to the signs that herald the end of society as we know it. He is a Latin teacher enjoying a sabbatical year; she is a writer working on a book that brings together all the different forms of love. Without knowing it, they are both destined to play a pivotal role in the new world that emerges from the collapse. The Book of All Loves (“El libro de todos los amores”) is a novel about love, the great subject that has preoccupied artists, scientists and thinkers since the dawn of time. Or rather, it is a book about the micro-loves that surround us, and an enquiry into the different dynamics that love adopts, both in the intimate sphere of the couple and in other aspects of public life such as politics, economics or science.

Playing with styles and genres, skilfully mixing fiction, poetry and essay, Agustín Fernández Mallo has written a fascinating philosophical novel that radically believes in hope from the dystopia of the present.

Quotes

The Book of All Loves

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Limbo

In his novel Limbo, Fernández Mallo takes the reader on a fascinating road trip. Looking for the enigmatic “Sound of the End”, a Spanish man and his Mexican girlfriend, a former kidnap victim, cross the United States from east to west coast. Meanwhile, two musicians have the chance of theirs lives to record a CD. But the producer’s house in Brittany seems to hide a terrible secret. Creating an exciting and poetic atmosphere, Fernández Mallo connects his characters as if they were in a net, taking his readers to a place in limbo where it is hard to tell the present from the past, one place from the other, life from death. But it isn’t mystery that grips us, but something far more disturbing: reality.

Quotes

Limbo

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Nocilla Dream

When Nocilla Dream, the first part of a trilogy that can be read separately, erupted energetically onto the Spanish literary scene, it attracted enormous interest for both critics and the general public alike. It is considered an ‘alternative’ or post-modern novel, with a lopsided narrative that neither begins, nor ends. This isn’t literature as we have hardly ever seen it before, but rather a sort of elaborate collage of extracts.

Quotes

Nocilla Dream

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Nocilla Experience

In Nocilla Experience, the second part of the trilogy, multiple voices are distributed throughout the 112 fragments that make up the novel, from Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy or Woody Allen’s Annie Hall to scientific theories by Newton and Einstein. Distinct excerpts interweave and begin to form a patchwork of coincidences and complementary snippets of information that expose the solitude of the protagonists. Absolutely anything can be narrative material; anything other than boredom.

Quotes

Nocilla Experience

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Nocilla Lab

The first part of Nocilla Lab tells the story of the birth of the trilogy through an internal monologue that develops into a stream of consciousness from the protagonist. After being knocked down by a motorbike during a trip in Thailand, Agustín Fernández Mallo was left bedridden for four weeks and had the opportunity to divulge his experiences in this tripartite account. Seven years later, when he travels with his girlfriend to Cerdena, they come across an old penitentiary that has been converted into an agri-tourism site. A memory of reading Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance in Portuguese and a ‘No entry’ sign bring the first part of the story to a close. In the second part, the author’s voice disappears and gives way to a fragmented account that is accompanied by a succession of drawings, sketches and quotes about some of the characters inside the penitentiary. The third part of the book is a succession of post poetic flashes and varied etymologies – both ironic and distant – aside tributes to García Márquez, Wittgenstein, and Duras. The language adopts almost the tone of a comic and finishes with an encounter between Enrique Vila-Matas and the author on an oil rig.

Quotes

Nocilla Lab

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I Always Return to the Nipples and to Proposition 7 of the Tractatus

I Always Return to the Nipples and to Proposition 7 of the Tractatus (“Yo siempre regreso a los pezones y al punto 7 del Tractatus”) is an intelligent and enjoyable soliloquy on the subjects of this world, starting from the loss of love and spanning all the way to language and its limits, which are perhaps also the limits of our own experience.

RIGHTS

SELECTION

NOVELS
Atom Heart Mother (“Madre de corazón atómico”)
Barcelona: Seix Barral, forthcoming May 2024, 240 p.

The Book of All Loves (“El libro de todos los amores”)
Barcelona: Seix Barral 2022, 248 p.
UK: Fitzcarraldo 2024

The Things We´ve Seen (“Trilogía de la guerra”)
Barcelona: Seix Barral 2018, 496 p.
Biblioteca Breve Prize
Italy: Utopia Editore 2022 · The Netherlands: Koppernik (forthcoming April 2024) · UK: Fitzcarraldo 2021

Limbo
Madrid/Buenos Aires/Mexico City: Alfaguara 2014, 224 p.
English and German sample translations available

Nocilla Project (“Proyecto Nocilla”)
(consisting of Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience and Nocilla Lab)
Madrid: Alfaguara 2013, 576 p.
European Literature Prize 2022
together with his Dutch translator
The Netherlands: Koppernik 2021, 2022 · UK: Fitzcarraldo 2022 · USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019

Nocilla Lab
Madrid: Alfaguara 2009, 184 p.
Sweden: Nirstedt Literatur 2021 · Turkey: Harfa · UK: Fitzcarraldo 2019 · USA: see “Proyecto Nocilla”

Nocilla Experience
Madrid: Alfaguara 2008, 208 p.
Selected as Book of the Year by the Spanish television program Miradas 2; Awarded the Pop-Eye prize in 2009
Brazil: Companhia das Letras 2013 · France: Editions Allia 2014 · Sweden: Nirstedt Literatur 2020 · Turkey: Harfa 2023 · UK: Fitzcarraldo 2016 · USA: see “Proyecto Nocilla”

Adapted as a graphic novel by Pere Joan:
Nocilla Experience. The Graphic Novel (“Nocilla Experience. La novela gráfica“)
Madrid: Alfaguara 2011, 191 p.

Nocilla Dream
Barcelona: Candaya 2006, 226 p.
German sample translation available
One of the ten best Spanish novels 2006, chosen by El Mundo; voted Best Novel of the Year by Quimera
Brazil: Companhia das Letras 2013 · France: Editions Allia 2012 · Italy: Neri Pozza 2007 · Korea: Nanda Publishers · Slovenia: Cankarjeva Zalozba-Zaloznistvo 2009 · Sweden: Nirstedt Literatur 2020 · Turkey: Harfa 2021 · UK: Fitzcarraldo 2015 · USA: see “Proyecto Nocilla”

NON-FICTION
La forma de la multitud
Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg 2023, 304 p.
Eugenio Trías Essay Prize 2022

General Theory of Rubbish. Culture, Appropriation, Complexity
(“Teoría general de la basura. Cultura, apropiación, complejidad”)

Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg 2018, 458 p.

Postpoetry, Towards a New Paradigm (“Postpoesía, hacia un nuevo paradigma”)
Madrid: Anagrama 2009 pb, 194 p.
Segundo Premio Anagrama de Ensayo

POETRY
Nobody Will Be Called Like Me Anymore + Collected Poems (1998-2012)
(“Ya nadie se llamará como yo + Poesía reunida (1998-2012)”)

Barcelona: Seix Barral 2015, 616 p.

Antibiotic (“Antibiótico”)
Madrid: Visor 2012, 100 p.

Creta Lateral Travelling
Palma de Mallorca: Sloper 2008, 138p.
First prize Café Món

Pixel Meat (“Carne de pixel”)
Barcelona: DVD 2008, 67 p.
Ciudad de Burgos Poetry Award 2007

Joan Fontaine Odisea [My Deconstruction] (“Joan Fontaine Odisea [mi deconstrucción]”)
(poemario-performance)
Barcelona: La Poesía Señor Hidalgo 2005, 137 p.

I Always Return to the Nipples and to Proposition 7 of the Tractatus
(“Yo siempre regreso a los pezones y al punto 7 del Tractatus”)
Madrid: Edición personal 2001, Alfaguara 2012, 64 p.
Italy: Interno Editora