Today! is the official publication date! of my translation! of Antoine Volodine’s book, Solo Viola! I am so excited! I might just have to use a lot of exclamation points!

More calmly, however: Over the past few years of working on the translation, this story has felt more and more relevant, closer and closer to the world that we currently inhabit. I am so glad that it’s finally coming out, now in 2021, here in the United States—a time and place where I think we can really read it and benefit from it. And, I hope, enjoy it.

The inestimable Brian Evenson says:

Antoine Volodine’s Solo Viola is a deft evisceration of fascism, seen through another lens and dislocated to a fantastical world. Volodine, here and elsewhere in his hugely important work, shows how the political and the fantastical can be intertwined in a way that allows a powerful reevaluation to occur—a reevaluation that feels all too starkly relevant to twenty-first-century America.

The Chicago Review of Books chose it among their “12 Must-Read Books for May“:

Antoine Volodine has been exploding the boundaries of fiction for decades in his native France; now University of Minnesota Press brings one of his most fascinating experiments to U.S. readers with this new translation of Solo Viola. Its vision of performers and prisoners held under the sway of an authoritarian buffoon echoes eerily with our tumultuous present.

And for Foreword Reviews, Ho Lin writes that:

Antoine Volodine’s superb post-exotic novel Solo Viola imagines a society that’s one step removed from reality. With a narrative spiced up by absurdity and a dead serious message, this is a brisk, engrossing, and phantasmagorical take on tyranny and curbed freedoms.

I am so grateful to all the people who helped make this book happen: to the editors at Univocal and the University of Minnesota Press, to fellow translators who offered feedback and advice, to the cover artist, because I really freaking love that cover, to Lionel Ruffel for his insightful introduction, and to Antoine Volodine, if that is his real name (hint: it’s not), for answering my étonnantes questions. And I’m looking forward to seeing how readers react to this odd, profound, and to the best of my abilities, beautiful work.

To purchase: You can order Solo Viola from your local independent bookstore, which would be awesome. You can order it straight from the University of Minnesota Press. You can request it from your library. If you like e-books, you can get this one on Kindle or Nook.

However you choose to read: thank you, and I hope you like it.