Folger Book Club

From the visionary author of Sudden Death, a hallucinatory, revelatory colonial revenge story.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan – today’s Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés is accompanied by his captains, his troops, his prized horses, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn friar, and Malinalli, an enslaved, strategic Nahua princess. After nearly bungling their entrance to the city, the Spaniards are greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely Aztec princess Atotoxtli, sister and wife of Moctezuma. As they await their meeting with the emperor – who is at a political and spiritual crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get by – Cortés and his entourage are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the chances of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire. And what if… they don’t?

You Dreamed of Empires brings Tenochtitlan to life at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Álvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counterattack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection explores not only Shakespeare’s life and works, but also the plays’ historical context, source material, critical and performance histories, and the ways in which they inspire and are adapted by contemporary novelists.

Folger Book Club’s first translated novel, You Dreamed of Empires is a new perspective on the Spanish conquistadors’ arrival in what is now Mexico City. Predating Shakespeare by half a century, this early colonization nonetheless played a major part in Europe’s exploration and exploitation of the Americas and was still very much part of the cultural fabric against which Shakespeare and his Spanish contemporaries from Miguel Cervantes to Lope de Vega wrote their plays.

Victoria M. Muñoz is a former Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies fellow, and an assistant professor in the English department at Adelphi University in Garden City, Long Island. Her areas of expertise are English and Spanish early modern literature and drama, empire and the colonial world. Her first book, Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy: Tudor and Stuart Black Legends, was published in 2021 by Anthem Press in its “World Epic and Romance Series.” It uncovers how English literature and drama imagined the Spanish colonial world through the lens of romance literature.

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