Mona: A Novel

A sardonic Peruvian writer is thrust into a bizarre world of literary rivalries, erotic distractions, and mysterious traces of violence at a prestigious European award ceremony in this hypnotic and scabrous portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite. Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough exterior. She pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity when she learns that she is treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings. When nominated for "the most important literary award in Europe," Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. Isolated with her jet-lagged—and mostly male—competitors arriving from Japan, France, Armenia, Iran, and Colombia, the writers do what writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and resentments, stab rivals in the back, and hop in bed together. All the while, Mona keeps stumbling across mysterious traces of a violence she cannot explain. In Mona, Pola Oloixarac paints a jaw-dropping portrait of a new kind of feminist survivor of patronization and bizarre sexual encounters. But Mona's past won't stay past, and strange forces are working to deliver her the test of a lifetime in this wicked satire of the literary elite and exploration of art and violence.