Alejandro Jodorowsky was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants
in Tocopilla, Chile. From an early age, he became interested in
mime and theater; at the age of 23, he left for Paris to pursue the
arts, and has lived there ever since. A friend and companion of
Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, he founded the Panic movement
and has directed several classic films of this style, including The
Holy Mountain, El Topo and Santa Sangre. A mime artist, specialist
in the art of tarot, and prolific author, he has written novels,
poetry, short stories, essays, and over thirty successful comic
books, working with such highly regarded comic book artists as
Moebius and Bess. Restless Books will be publishing three of
Jodorowsky's best-known books for the first time in English: Donde
mejor canta un pájaro (Where the Bird Sings Best), El niño del
jueves negro (The Son of Black Thursday), and Albina y los hombres
perro (Albina and the Dog Men).
Alfred MacAdam is professor of Latin American literature at
Barnard College-Columbia University. He has translated works by
Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Carlos Onetti, José
Donoso, and Jorge Volpi among others. He recently published an
essay on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa included in the
Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.
"Deeply psychological and mysterious, the book will stimulate the
imagination of the reader's mind to the extreme.”
—Marina Abramovic
“In his latest novel, Jodorowsky builds on his multi-decade long
assault of the public imagination…. a fantastical and genre-defying
parable of love and friendship…. Throughout this dark dream of a
novel, Jodorowsky's writing is comic and occasionally mesmerizing.
It is also ripe with horror and philosophical questions about what
it means to belong, everywhere and nowhere. And while some of the
subject matter is disturbing, it often carries the air of something
ancient that you read children by a fire. For years Jodorowsky has
proven the intensity of his imagination, and how far he is willing
to go to present his singular vision to the world. He is a fully
realized artist whose tales demand attention. At its core, Albina
and the Dog-Men is a love story about two people committed to one
another's survival and to discovering their potential. And, as with
life, it is sometimes only through the weathering of a storm that
our true capacities are made clear.”
—Juan Vidal, NPR Books
“[Albina and the Dog-Men] may be the ultimate piece of Jodorowsky
arcana, a mind-bending adventure story on par with his wildest
cinematic visions.… A surrealist novel par excellence, Albina and
the Dog-Men is a dream, a prophecy, a hallucination, and a
transfiguration such as only Jodorowsky could induce.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Composed like a feverish fairytale, Albina and the Dog-Men is a
South American parable of self-acceptance and belonging that is
fueled by prurience and colored with vivid, hallucinogenic
details.… No moment of Jodorowsky’s book is at all predictable or
familiar, and those who have a taste for the uncanny will be in awe
over its undulations into strange, even godly, territory. The
sensuality of the prose thickens as Albina’s situation becomes more
tenuous, resulting in heady and appealing constructions.… As Albina
and her followers traipse over barren lands and into forests
protected by ancient Incans, the novel winds toward territory both
magical and needfully human. The surreal methods of redemption in
the novel’s final pages prove both glorious and moving.
Jodorowsky’s is a work of unforgettable weirdness, a work whose
movements are directed by sometimes violent mysticism and whose
final lessons may speak to all who have ever dreamed of
transformation.”
—Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews, Five-Star
Review
“An imaginative mythology from the incomparable Alejandro
Jodorowsky… Like Alejandro Jodorowsky himself, Albina and the
Dog-Men seems to be all imaginable things at once.… The language is
instantly visual, and Alfred MacAdam’s deft translation is
whimsical and fantastic without drifting into adolescence. Albina
and the Dog-Men is the product of an unfathomable, affecting
imagination.”
—Benjamin Russell, Americas Quarterly
“To read Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Albina and the Dogmen is to careen
through a surreal landscape on a mythic roller coaster….
[Jodorowsky] deftly pairs the beautiful and the strange, the ugly
and the lovely, the bodily hideous and the purified holy. His prose
is poetic.... His precision is captivating. A translated work can
sometimes suffer from dryness, but Alfred MacAdam has done a
masterful job preserving Jodorowsky’s insane clip.... It’s
fantastic.... Crude and clever, beautiful and weird, read
Jodorowsky if you want to feel like you’ve run a marathon through a
fever dream."
—Christina Kloess, Chicago Review of Books
“Is there a more thrillingly warped visionary artist working today
than Alejandro Jodorowsky? ….Featuring a dwarf, an irascible woman,
Incan iconography, and a search for a magical elixir hundreds of
years in the making, the plot is pure Jodorowsky. It is psychedelic
and weird in the best possible way — where else could you find a
werewolf-type plot that manages to be a deep examination of desire
and spirituality?... Jodorowsky’s madcap fantasy novel … [shows]
that despite featuring talking parrots, albino strippers, and giant
hares, Albina and the Dog-Men actually has a lot to say about
things like hope, depression, and the power of love.”
—Manuel Betancourt, Remezcla
“Alejandro Jodorowsky needs no introduction.… [Albina and the
Dog-Men is] characteristically indescribable.… Freedom from
limitations is something I really appreciate in [Jodorowsky’s]
work. Most writers distinguish between genres, moods, and tones,
but [he] puts it all together and pushes it out there.… Albina
contains thousands of ideas, or at least hundreds of ideas. On
every page, there’s a new idea, and then another.”
—Daniel Kalder, Los Angeles Review of Books
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