{"product_id":"book-dtui","title":"Natural History","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJust 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeven 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 realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of obsession.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eNatural History\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blackstone Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Audiobook","offer_id":49292221972784,"sku":"BDdtui","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audio CD","offer_id":49292222005552,"sku":"ZEdtui","price":34.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audio MP3-CD","offer_id":49292222038320,"sku":"ZMdtui","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0879\/2784\/9264\/files\/dtui-Square-cover.jpg?v=1775910176","url":"https:\/\/downpour.com\/products\/book-dtui","provider":"Downpour","version":"1.0","type":"link"}