Deal Announcement: Deep Vellum to Publish Alberto Laiseca's LOS SORIAS in Spring 2029
Deep Vellum is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Los Sorias by Alberto Laiseca, to be translated by Max Lawton, for publication in Spring 2029, represented by Editorial Barrett (World English).
Alberto Laiseca is a titan of Argentinian literature, not merely forgotten, but yet to be truly discovered even in his homeland. His masterpiece, Los Sorias—the longest Argentinian novel ever published, written over ten years while the author was working as a janitor and living in boarding houses, out of print in Spanish until recently and hard to find even in Buenos Aires—has until now languished untranslated.
What is The Sorias? It is an entire world.
Laiseca crafts an alternate universe in which a new world war is playing out among three superpowers: Soria, Technocracy, and the USSR. The book overflows with the chronicles of imagined events, related as if they were real history. While describing in excruciating detail the near-constant atrocities committed on all sides, Laiseca saves his sharpest satire for the officials and intellectuals who work to disguise the crimes committed by the powerful. Among the other characters marooned in these three states are philosophizing vagabonds, magicians, zombies, robots, and a host of demonic creatures spawned by a force of absolute evil dubbed Anti-Being.
Though The Sorias has been called a Latin American Gravity’s Rainbow, Laiseca comes on much faster––and more violently––than Pynchon, immediately hurling the reader into a Zone much denser and stranger than anything yet dreamed up in American fiction.
“We publish a huge variety of books at Deep Vellum, but it’s no secret that we’ve lately become a home for maximalist, groundbreaking novels in translation,” says Will Evans, Publisher. “Mircea Cartarescu’s Solenoid and his forthcoming Theodoros, Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh, and Antonio Moresco’s The Beginnings—the latter two translated by Max Lawton. In 2027, we’re releasing Moresco’s Songs of Chaos. In 2028, we’ve got Mikhail Shishkin’s The Taking of Izmail. 2029 belongs to The Sorias. And 2030 will see Moresco’s The Uncreated Ones—the last book in his Games of Eternity trilogy. Nobody else is publishing books like this, at this rate and at this scale.”
Evans continues: “We’ve seen an incredible response from American readers, folks tired of the same-old-same-old and hungry for the adventurous, the mind-altering, the world-expanding. The alternative awaits. The avant-garde awaits. Deep Vellum is committed to those readers, and we hope to keep taking on enormously ambitious, borderline quixotic projects for a long time to come. The Sorias may very well be the wildest ride of them all.”
“I strive to translate books that are unpredictable in the way they come into English,” says translator Max Lawton. “I have no idea how The Sorias will read once I’m done with it, but I do know that it will blow minds, attracting mad plaudits and criticism alike, befuddling and enticing—confounding, estranging. I am so sick of normal books. Nothing could be less normal than The Sorias. Imagine a new version of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, staged as an homage to Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Insatiability, lasting in excess of 1,000 hours…”
The Sorias is the latest acquisition in Deep Vellum’s The Great (Un)Translated series, named in homage to Andrei, a friend of the press and the founding steward of The Untranslated blog, the seminal reference for great books not yet available to English-speaking audiences. Deep Vellum owes a debt of gratitude to Andrei for championing all of these books, and for his instrumental role in encouraging Lawton to undertake their translations.
Alberto Laiseca was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1941, though his family soon moved to Camilo Aldao, where he has been declared an Illustrious Citizen. He began studying Chemical Engineering at the National University of the Littoral, but abandoned his studies to dedicate himself to writing. He worked as a laborer, garbage collector, and, later in Buenos Aires, as an employee of ENTel (Argentina's state-owned telephone company). After writing short stories for newspapers and anthologies, he published his first novel, Su turno para morir (Your Turn to Die), in 1976. With his book of short stories, Matando enanos a garrotazos (Killing Dwarfs with Clubs), and the novel Aventuras de un novelista atonal (Adventures of an Atonal Novelist), Laiseca cemented his status as a cult figure among emerging writers of his generation, such as César Aira and Ricardo Piglia. Among his students are the writers Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and Selva Almada. All the books in Laiseca's personal library are covered in white paper and numbered "to prevent identification and theft." Los Sorias is his most ambitious novel. In it, his entire literary universe expands, and he even declared that when he finished it, he knew he would never write anything like it again. He worked on it for ten years, his manuscript was almost stolen at the train station, and it wasn't until sixteen years later (in 1998) that it was first published in Argentina, in an edition of 350 numbered copies, signed by the author himself, by the publisher Simurg. Alberto Laiseca died in 2016 at the age of seventy-five.
Max Lawton is a writer, musician, and translator. He is currently working in close collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin to publish all of his untranslated works in English. His translation of Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh was one of the most anticipated English-language titles of 2025. Max is also currently working on or has plans to translate works by Antonio Moresco, Stefano D’Arrigo, Alberto Laiseca, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eduard Limonov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Miquel de Palol. His first novel, Progress, is coming out with Verso in 2027. He lives in Los Angeles, where, when he isn’t writing, he plays heavy metal and noise music.
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For rights inquiries, contact Sarah McEachern: sm@deepvellum.org