Toni Sala at The Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco

An event to celebrate the release of Toni Sala’s riveting, tragic novel The Boys.

Acclaimed Catalan writer Toni Sala and his celebrated translator Mara Faye Lethem will be at San Francisco’s Bookbinder’s Museum for a night of Catalan literature. Two Lines Press’s Editorial Director CJ Evans will moderate the conversation.

Toni Sala’s award-winning novel The Boys is the first of his books to ever be published in English. Called “altogether brilliant” by Kirkus, and considered a masterpiece in Catalonia, the book centers around the dark thoughts that follow the deaths of two young men in a recession-battered small town in the bucolic Catalonian countryside. With philosophical digressions worthy of Javier Marías, Sala ponders everything from love and death to the social networks and Spain’s economic collapse while delivering a riveting, and truly shocking, story. This amazing book received the 2014 Premis de la Crítica, Catalonia’s most prestigious literary award.

Toni Sala is the author of over a dozen novels and works of nonfiction. In 2005 he was awarded the National Literature Prize by the Catalan government, and in 2014 he received the Premis de la Crítica for The Boys.

Mara Faye Lethem’s translations have appeared in The Best American Non-Required Reading, Granta, The Paris Review, Words Without Borders, and McSweeney’s. She is the translator of Papers in the Wind by Eduardo Sacheri, Wonderful World by Javier Calvo, among others.

CJ Evans is the Editorial Director of Two Lines Press and a poet. He is the author of A Penance, which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets chapbook series.

Toni Sala creates an exercise in style that meditates on our most primal identity.

—Time Out Barcelona

One hopes this tremendous novel, already an award-winner overseas, will receive the attention it deserves here.

—Publishers Weekly

Tapas from local Catalan restaurant B44 and red wine will be served.