Out Today!: "The Fake Muse" by Max Besora & Mara Faye Lethem

Another linguistic and conceptual tour-de-force from the winners of the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award

“[A] spirited and unhinged romp. [. . .] When viewed as an act of resistance against literary and societal conventions, this scorching novel offers plenty of fun. Adventurous readers will admire Besora’s moxie.”—Publishers Weekly

The Fake Muse by Max Besora, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Pub Date: 2/18/25, ISBN: 978-1-960385-33-8)

Max Besora & Mara Faye Lethem are back with a truly wild, explosive, imaginative, ever-shifting voice-driven novel made up with plot lines straight out of B-movies and pulp novels—but ends with a very rewarding twist.

You might remember Besora & Lethem from the exquisitely titled, The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, which won Mara the inaugural Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award in 2022 for her remarkable rendition of the invented seventeenth-century dialects Max created for the original. (Seriously, check this out. Especially if you’re a Barth fan—Orpí, is inspired by The Sot-Weed Factor.)

By comparison, The Fake Muse is looser, shorter, more akin to punk rock zines than historic events. Here’s how we described it:

The Fake Muse opens by introducing us, one by one, to an array of troubled characters, each with their own typographical voice. There’s Johnny (an Aries) who turns into a vampire at a showing of Nosferatu, there’s Meritxell (a Leo) who falls in love with a giant mutant hamster-philosopher, Josep (Cancer) who is also known as the “King Kong of the Bronx,” and Amanda aka Maryjane (Scorpio) who has had it with the abuse she’s suffered at the hands of the . . . author, Max Besora (Aquarius), and who is ready to take whatever action necessary.

Wildly inventive, with each character’s vignette more hilarious and explosive than the last, The Fake Muse weaves these stories together into a thrilling cinema-like production à la Sonic Youth meets Quentin Tarantino, raising questions about power structures, victimization, and the role of the author in bringing it all to life.

In many ways, Besora is a bit of a throwback to the ’60s and ’70s and the works of Robert Coover and the aforementioned John Barth. He embraces the tools of so-called “postmodernism,” writing himself into the book, playing with form, making clear that the book is not a neo-realistic representation of the world, dismantling the idea of a novel having one stable meaning—all resulting in books that are incredibly playful, while also raising questions about authority, control, and responsibility.

To give you a sense of what this book is like, I’m attaching a couple images, since Substack can’t handle this sort of textual play:

FYI: In collaboration with the always excellent “Life on Books” podcast, we’re currently running a sale on our website for all our books—including The Fake Muse—through the end of February. Use the code LIFE at checkout for 30% off. (Only valid for U.S. orders. Still working on international shipping options.)

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Max Besora has written five novels: Volcano (2011, rewritten and republished 2021), Marvelous Technology (2014) (forthcoming from Open Letter), The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia (2017), The Fake Muse (2020), and His Master's Voice (2022) and one fictional essay on urban music, Trapology (2018).

Mara Faye Lethem is a writer, researcher, and literary translator. Winner of the inaugural Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award for Max Besora’s The Adventures and Misadventures of Joan Orpí, she was also awarded the Joan Baptiste Cendrós International Prize for her contributions to Catalan literature. Her translation of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski, and winner of the Nota Bene Prize and the Lewis Galantière Award. Her novel, A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small, has been translated into two languages. She is currently writing a memoir.