José Manuel prieto

Now in paperback, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire was acclaimed by The Hartford Courant as «a thrilling discovery … a reversal of the letters [of] Saul Bellow's Herzog … [with] a Nabokovian delight in words and texts.» J. is a smuggler living in Russia, making his living fencing the flotsam of communism's collapse. In Istanbul he takes a commission to trap an endangered Russian butterfly and decides to use it as an opportunity to smuggle V., his Russian lover who has no...

Now in paperback, José Manuel Prieto’s Rex is a sexy, zany, and sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos who have settled in western Europe.J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As...