Among Strange Victims

Brief, brilliantly written, and kissed by a sense of the absurd....like a much lazier, Mexico City version of Dostoevsky's Underground Man."**John Powers, *Fresh Air***

Daniel Saldana Paris knows how to talk about those other tragedies populating daily life: a boring, unwanted marriage; mind numbing office work; family secrets. He builds on those bricks of tedium a greatly enjoyable and splendidly well-written suburban farce. **Yuri Herrera**

Rodrigo likes his vacant lot, its resident chicken, and being left alone. But when passivity finds him accidentally married to Cecilia, he trades Mexico City for the sun-bleached desolation of his hometown and domestic life with Cecilia for the debauched company of a poet, a philosopher, and Micaela, whose allure includes the promise of time travel. Earthy, playful, and sly, *Among Strange Victims *is a psychedelic ode to the pleasures of not measuring up.

**Daniel Saldana Paris **(born Mexico City, 1984) is an essayist, poet, and novelist whose work has been translated into English, French, and Swedish and anthologized, most recently in *Mexico20: New Voices, Old Traditions*, published in the United Kingdom by Pushkin Press. *Among Strange Victims *is his first novel to appear in the United States. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.