Jacob Rogers Presents his translation of The Last Days of Terranova by Manuel Rivas, in conversation with Eric Banks

 
Tuesday
January 24th
7pm
 
McNally Jackson Seaport
RSVP Required — see below
 

A far-reaching story of an outcast and his bookstore: a home to forbidden books, political dissidents, and cultural smugglers all brought to vivid poetic life

“Rivas is a master… His pages bloom like flowers, swerving in unpredictable arcs toward a light-source that is constantly moving.”  —Bookforum

The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it's set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitive histories.
 
Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo's childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away from the bookstore as possible, in Madrid.
 
Like the bookstore itself, The Last Days of Terranova is a space crammed with stories, histories, and literary references, and as many nooks, crannies, and complexities, brought to life in Rivas’s vital prose.

We recommend that guests wear masks on the night. 

 
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician prose and poetry. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Asymptote, Best European Fiction 2019, PRISM International, Cagibi, Your Impossible Voice, Nashville Review, The Brooklyn Rail, InTranslation, the Portico of Galician Literature, Lunch Ticket, Copper Nickel, and ANMLY. His translation of Carlos Casares’s novel, His Excellency, was published by Small Stations Press in 2017.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

Eric Banks, Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, is a writer and editor based in New York. A former senior editor of Artforum, Banks was editor-in-chief of Bookforum from 2003–2008. From 2011 to 2013, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle. He was a judge of the Pulitzer Prize committees in Fiction in 2017 and 2020 and was chair of the judges committee in 2017. Banks’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and Aperture. He has contributed essays to monographs on a number of artists, including Franz West, Christopher Wool, and Grant Wood. Additionally, he has edited numerous catalogs and collections of artists writings and is the consulting editor of the Robert Rauschenberg Catalogue Raisonné. .

 

 

 

 

 

RSVP Below

In order to keep our events program running in uncertain times, we're asking attendees to hold their place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the event on any product in store or in our bar & café. You can alternatively reserve a spot by pre-purchasing the event book. If you have a change of heart or plans, write to events@mcnallyjackson.com and we'll gladly refund you and release your spot, up to 24 hours before the event. Thanks for understanding, and for supporting your local bookstore.