1. ABOUT THE BOOK

From Alejandro Jodorowsky—the legendary director of The Holy Mountain, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, and author of Where the Bird Sings Best—comes another autobiographical tour-de-force: a mythopoetic portrait of the artist as a young man in Chile in the tumultuous 1930s.

In Where the Bird Sings Best —Alejandro Jodorowsky’s visionary autobiographical novel that NPR compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude and called “a genius’s surreal vision brought to life”—we followed Jodorowsky’s predecessors as they came to Chile, fleeing pogroms in Ukraine. Now, in The Son of Black Thursday, Jodorowsky himself takes the stage alongside the unforgettable cast of his early years as they confront the horrors of indentured servitude in American-backed copper mines and the brutal oppression of a corrupt government.

Alongside the young dreamer Alejandro, we follow his father, Jaime, who’s obsessed with assassinating the dictator whom he ends up serving; his mother, Sara Felicidad, a spiritually attuned giantess who moonlights as a shopkeeper-turned-revolutionary and sings instead of speaks; Rubi, the mystic heiress to the copper mines who conceives a magnificent sacrifice to foment a workers’ revolt; and the ghost of a wise rabbi who’s been passed down as mentor from one Jodorowsky generation to the next.

In its captivating blend of wonder, horror, humor, eros, and magic, The Son of Black Thursday is another mind-expanding opus from Jodorowsky that feels both cosmically true and and urgently needed for our time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alejandro Jodorowsky was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Tocopilla, Chile, in 1929. Internationally renowned as a filmmaker for The Holy Mountain and El Topo and for his starring role in Jodorowsky’s Dune, Jodorowsky has also produced comics, plays, books on Psychomagic and Tarot, and two other novels published by Restless Books: Where the Bird Sings Best and Albina and the Dog-Men.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator from Kentucky. Her work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Lina Meruane, Mariana Enríquez, Álvaro Bisama, Arturo Fontaine, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, Mandorla, and VICE, among others. Her translation of Zambra's novel Ways of Going Home won the 2013 PEN Award for Writing in Translation. She lives in Santiago, Chile.