| Author/Contributor(s): | Kornberg, Julia |
| Publisher: | Astra House |
| Date: | 5/25/2027 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
From a rising talent, an epic literary thriller for readers of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake.
The Parties is the story of K, a cokehead from a declassé Irish suburb in Buenos Aires with an extraordinary talent for languages. She moves to New York City as a young woman after being recruited by a mysterious university run by U.S. intelligence services that specializes in languages, controlled opposition, and counter-intelligence. As a twenty-something agent living in Chinatown, K infiltrates a new cohort of students that is organizing a hacker insurgency inspired by Latin American revolutionary guerrillas. She eventually becomes part of the conspiracy, known as The Great Translation, which aims to hack New York City’s government and make Spanish the city’s sole official language. The novel drifts from party to party in an irreverent, sensual, and Babelic sequence of violence and celebration.
Set in an alternative present where the U.S. is escalating military tensions with Iran and Mexico, The Parties is told in seven chapters, each split in three between a section in the present (which takes place over four days), a section in the past (over four years) and a section that reproduces intelligence memos about the group’s actions. In the past, K becomes involved with the insurgency, attempts to understand the group’s objectives and rises through the military and academic ranks as a result. She closely befriends two members of the group: Sascha, a Jewish, post-Soviet émigré from Brighton Beach who becomes an unwitting informant, and Lupe, a Mexican-Romanian woman who enamors K, confusing her and blurring her judgment. What started as a citywide prank soon turns bloody, posing questions about the ethics of guerrilla warfare and the limits of revolutionary violence. The present-day timeline takes place after the insurgency’s failure. The plot is triggered by the return of a raving, dangerous and mystical Sascha who haunts K and rehashes the dreams of a Latin American conquest of New York.