Overview

From the critically acclaimed author of Savage Theories and Dark Constellations comes Pola Oloixarac's Mona, where success as a "writer of color" proves to be a fresh hell for a young Latin American woman at a literary conference in Sweden.
Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she is something of an anthropological curiosity—a woman writer of color treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings—she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity.
When she is nominated for "the most important literary award in Europe," Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, so she trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. Now she is stuck in the company of all her...