{
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  "title": "Natural History",
  "subtitle": null,
  "slug": "natural-history",
  "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history",
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  "markdown": "https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history.md",
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Carlos M. Fonseca",
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  "original_title": null,
  "original_language": null,
  "first_published": "2020-08-01",
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      "heading": "Fiction: literary and general non-genre"
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  "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/farrar-straus-and-giroux/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history_978-03-7421-630-6-e202d3ed.webp?v=2026-10-20%2004%3A04%3A09",
  "description": "Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator's fascination with the hidden forms of the animal kingdom - with camouflage and subterfuge - and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the form of which itself remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the death of the designer, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues to the true story of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungle. On the way, he discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion: an aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, who creates models of ruined cities; a former model turned conceptual artist - and a defendant in a trial over the very nature and purpose of art; a young indigenous boy who has received a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, as the curator realises, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of obsession. Natural History is the portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, between tragedy and farce. A defiantly contemporary and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.",
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      "title": "Natural History",
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      "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history/9780374216306",
      "publisher": "Farrar, Straus and Giroux",
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      "medium": "paper",
      "duration_seconds": null,
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      "isbn": "978-03-7421-630-6",
      "pages": 320,
      "published": "2020-08-01",
      "language": "en_US",
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}