{
  "type": "edition",
  "site": {
    "name": "The Book Quiver",
    "language": "en-US",
    "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com"
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  "formats": "Every page has two versions with the same data: JSON (the page address + .json) and markdown (the page address + .md). Append .json or .md to any `url` in this document.",
  "title": "Natural History",
  "subtitle": null,
  "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history/9780374216306",
  "publisher": "Farrar, Straus and Giroux",
  "publisher_series": [],
  "translators": [],
  "medium": "paper",
  "duration_seconds": null,
  "narrators": [],
  "illustrators": [],
  "cover_artists": [],
  "isbn": "978-03-7421-630-6",
  "pages": 320,
  "published": "2020-08-01",
  "language": "en_US",
  "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",
  "json": "https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history/9780374216306.json",
  "markdown": "https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history/9780374216306.md",
  "binding": "Hardcover",
  "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.",
  "book": {
    "title": "Natural History",
    "slug": "natural-history",
    "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca/natural-history"
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  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Carlos M. Fonseca",
      "slug": "carlos-m-fonseca",
      "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/carlos-m-fonseca"
    }
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}