Agustín Fernández Mallo,Nocilla Dream, Trans. by Thomas Bunstead, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015.
Nocilla Dream is one of the most daring literary experiments of recent years, exploring the mysterious connections between the lives of marginal figures in a globalised society. Everything starts in the Nevada desert, where a solitary tree is covered in pairs of shoes. By a butterfly effect, a chain of events affects a host of bad B-movie characters littered across the globe. Brothel blondes in the Midwest dream of absconding eastwards; anti-crats live in newly formed micro-nations underground; an Argentine man living in a motel in Las Vegas builds a peculiar monument to Jorge Luis Borges - Full of references to indie cinema, collage, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel, the first instalment of the Nocilla Trilogy finds beauty in emptiness and kick-starts a regeneration in Spanish literature.
'It is well known to observers of Spanish fiction that for about the last five years most debates on our emerging authors have taken into account the so-called "Nocilla Generation," a journalistic label coined after the publication of Agustin Fernandez Mallo's Nocilla Dream (2007) and used to group some writers whose works experimented interestingly with elements from Anglo-Saxon (McCaffery's Avant-pop, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders ... ) and pop culture that were not very common or appreciated in Spain at that time.' - Antonio J. Rodriguez, The Quarterly Conversation 'Just as Marcel Duchamp would take a bicycle wheel to create an artwork that challenged the very notion of the museum and of the spectator, Fernandez Mallo takes everything he sees and reads and compresses it into his writing to make it go in unexpected directions. Like others before him, he is attempting to challenge the idea of narrative and of the reading experience, drawing on references,from Coppola to Einstein, Borges to Cortazar, Heraclites or even a mere newspaper article.' - Philippe Lancon 'A publishing phenomenon that gave rise to a new generation of writers ... has landed in Brazil and makes its author a possible successor to [Roberto] Bolano.' - O Estado de S. Paulo
Agustín Fernández Mallo,was born in La Coruna in 1967. He is a qualified physicist and since 2000 has been collaborating with various cultural publications in order to highlight the connection between art and science. His Nocilla Trilogy brought about an important shift in contemporary Spanish writing and paved the way for the birth of a new generation of authors, known as the 'Nocilla Generation'.