Dengue Boy Paperback by Michel Nieva; translated by Rahul Bery

Product Details

• Publisher: Strange Light (2025-02-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 224 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780771012389
• Item Weight: 158.76 grams
• Dimensions: 6.99 x 5.0 x 0.57 cm

A cyberpunk fever-dream of climate catastrophe: the full-length fiction debut from one of the boldest new voices in Argentinian literature, thrillingly translated by Rahul Bery.

After the last Antarctic icecaps melt, calamity follows. Landscapes are radically transformed, diseases mutate and spread with unprecedented speed, and, in response, forms the ghastly “virofinance” exchange—a market for corporations to profit from pandemics and global suffering.

It’s in this grim near-future of 2272, where words such as “winter” and “cold” have no meaning, the Dengue Child grows.

The monstrous humanoid mosquito emerges in newly tropical Argentina, carrying its namesake virus and despairing of its own existence. Bullies brutalize the child until a violent eruption of revelation and transformation takes place, shockwaves of which will extend far beyond the schoolyard into a society full of terrors and wonders enabled and exposed by climate collapse.

Powerful telepathic stones from the bowels of the earth, sought after by smugglers, seem to hold a volatile, primordial wisdom. The meager remaining glaciers are harvested for skating rinks on luxury cruises. And the youth obsess over an immersive, addictive video game that presents a virtual world far more attractive than reality.

In the tradition of Kafka, Cronenberg, and Philip K. Dick, Michel Nieva's brilliant, hilarious, and demented Dengue Boy draws on manga, body horror, and gaucho-punk science fiction to tell a delirious, frenetic, singular story about the ravages of capitalism and what hope might exist, if any, for revenge and rebirth.

About the Author

MICHEL NIEVA (1988) is an Argentinian writer based in NYC, where he teaches Writing at NYU. A Granta's Best Spanish Young Novelists 2021 and also a 2022 O'Henry Prize Winner, Nieva has written short stories, collections of essays, and now, with Dengue Boy, his first novel.

RAHUL BERY translates from Spanish & Portuguese to English, and is based in Cardiff. He has translated books by David Trueba, Afonso Cruz, Simone Campos and Vicente Luis Mora and his translations have also appeared in Granta, the TLS, the Stinging Fly, Words Without Borders, Freeman's, the White Review, and elsewhere. His most recent translation is What is Mine by José Henrique Bortoluci, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. His translation of David Trueba's Rolling Fields was shortlisted for the 2021 TA First Translation Prize.