Michael Zapata
“From national teacher strikes, to cacerolazo protests in Chile, to indigenous struggles against austerity and Amazon oil extraction in Ecuador, I can’t help but think that every movement for social change starts both with the inequitable material conditions that created it and also a narrative of how the past and future collide with the present. The novel, with all its vast interiority and universe-bending possibility, is vital to that.”
“The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is a stunner—equal parts epic and intimate, thrilling and elegiac. As the novel bounds effortlessly through time, a powerful ode to the mysteries that echo across generations, the wonder of artistic creation, and the profound unknowability of what exactly constitutes ‘reality’ emerges. Michael Zapata’s inventive, twisty plot will keep you reading through the night, and his indelible characters will make a home in your heart.”
“Hypnotizing…Zapata reinterprets the extent and toll of exile on Earth, the gulf between universes of human experience.”
“Smart and heart-piercing, Lost Book is a story of displacement, erasure, identity, mythology, and the ability of literature to simultaneously express and transcend our lives — not to mention reality.”
“An illuminating work on trauma and the transience of human existence... A heady literary and genre-bending novel for fans of Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Adolfo Bioy Caseres.”
Michael Zapata is the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (Hanover Square Press, 2020), winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is also a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction and the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program Award.
In an interview, Zapata was asked about the importance of storytelling for his characters. “In the course of writing this, and in the course of my research, I found a lot of inspiration and I found a lot of material through reading oral storytelling.” He responded. “ One of the long-standing Chicago oral storytellers and oral historian Studs Terkel was a big inspiration for me. I found it very interesting to take moments throughout the novel to allow characters, whether we see them for a few pages or whether we see them throughout the entire novel, to tell their own story, to paint a portrait of themselves not only as aspects of revolution or resistance but also in the sense of being able to tell stories about their own survivals.”
He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.
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(c) Organic Headshots/Michelle Kaffko.
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