Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun - by Mónica Ojeda Paperback

Book Synopsis

National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival's so-called "celebration of life." Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun blends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.

Review Quotes

Praise for Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

"A rare, strange treasure; a story told in daring, luminous prose, populated by characters with poetry in their hearts." --Natalia Theodoridou, author of Sour Cherry

"Psychedelia, volcanoes, disintegration. Following Ojeda on this journey is, without a doubt, an intense experience." --Mariana Enríquez, author of A Sunny Place for Shady People

"Mónica Ojeda is a dazzling black sun in the astral chart of contemporary horror." --Fernanda Melchor, author of Paradais

"With fear and fascination, that's how I read Mónica Ojeda. As if reading a spell, as if biting into flesh, fearing to find something sharp inside. So poetic, so disturbing, and brutal." --Samanta Schweblin, author of Little Eyes

Praise for Mónica Ojeda

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize

"[Ojeda's] language, like adolescence itself, is unruly and excessive, full of dramatic shifts and capable of both beauty and horror." --Anderson Tepper, The New York Times

"Ojeda is a strikingly singular voice." --Yvonne C. Garrett, The Brooklyn Rail

"Ojeda [draws] comparisons to Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allen Poe." --The A.V. Club

"Mónica Ojeda has at her disposal the most enviable combination I can imagine, and she has it in spades: a lucid mind, an exacting language, and a wild heart." --Andrés Barba, author of A Luminous Republic

About the Author

Mónica Ojeda is the author of the novels La desfiguración Silva, Nefando, and Mandíbula (published in English as Jawbone), as well as the poetry collections El ciclo de las piedras and Historia de la leche. Her stories have been published in the anthology Emergencias: Doce cuentos iberoamericanos and the collections Caninos and Las voladoras. In 2017, she was included on the Bógota39 list of the best thirty-nine Latin American writers under forty, and in 2019, she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award in honor of her outstanding literary achievements.

Sarah Booker is an educator and literary translator. Her translations include Mónica Ojeda's Nefando and Jawbone, Gabriela Ponce's Blood Red, and Cristina Rivera Garza's Death Takes Me (co-translated with Robin Myers), New and Selected Stories, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, and The Iliac Crest. She has a PhD in Hispanic Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill and is currently based in Morganton, North Carolina where she teaches at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. She is an associate editor with Southwest Review.