Deep Vellum invites you to a book launch event for Freeway: La Movie by Jorge Enrique Lage! This special event will feature a reading and conversation with the book’s translator Lourdes Molina and Shelby Vincent, associate director of the Translation Center at UTD and translator of Heavens on Earth.

About the Book

A novel-in-stories set in mid-twenty-first century dystopian Havana, Freeway narrates the adventure of two misfits wandering the construction site of a colossal freeway-to-be — a mysterious feat of engineering that slices through Havana, designed to connect the US and Cuba. The two embark on a futile journey, overlaid with the elusive filming of a documentary about the freeway construction. Both film quality and interior monologues drift aimlessly, haunted by Cuban history and US pop culture.

Freeway: La Movie is a satirical novel that attempts to reconcile what might be hopelessly irreconcilable: the body and the machine; analog and digital; post-industrial overdevelopment and post-socialist underdevelopment; Cuba and the US; reality and fiction; the plasticity of personal identity and rigid categories such as gender, class, and nationality. Through the clash of utopian promises and dystopian realities, Freeway reveals the unease of contemporary culture from the US to Cuba.

About the Presenters

Lourdes Molina teaches Spanish language and Spanish and Spanish American literature at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in 20th-century Latin American literature and history, focusing on Cuban studies and literary translation.

Shelby Vincent received her PhD in Literary Translation from the University of Texas at Dallas's School of Arts and Humanities in 2015. She is currently translating another of Boullosa's novels entitled The Virgin and the Violin, which is loosely based on the female Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola, and which Deep Vellum will publish in 2018.