Season of the Swamp

New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.

In Season of the Swamp Yuri Herrera brilliantly reimagines how the eighteen pivotal months in New Orleans prepared Juárez for the revolutions to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, it is a magnificent work of speculative history and a love letter to the city that holds up an unexpected mirror to the of world we still live in.

“The always thrilling and always remarkable Yuri Herrera has outdone himself here: reading Season of the Swamp is like being thrown into deep water only to open your eyes and find a haunting and haunted world, one full of magic and beauty, exiles and outsiders, longing and song. I didn’t want to surface—here I am still, in its great, brilliant light.”—Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey