Depicting the 20th century as a character, this novel explores what happens when that character, dying, passes through a Bardo state—an intermediate state of the soul between death and rebirth.
“Written in a style that crosses Kafka’s paranoid paradoxes with the post-apocalyptic morality of Heironymus Bosch via William S. Burroughs,Bardo99is a fast-paced hallucinogenic trip . . . It catalogues 20th-century human atrocities and employs the idea that souls of bodies never given proper burial and/or subject to wrongful death cannot rest in peace. The protagonist’s soul encounters the misshapen, anguished souls of those killed in concentration camps, on the killing fields of Eastern Europe, and in other ways and in other places, while on its own journey to a place of rest.” —Education Digest
Cecile Pinedareceived a National Endowment Fiction Fellowship to write The Love Queen of the Amazon,aNew York TimesNotable Book of the Year.