CANR
WORK TITLE: Every Arc Bends Its Radian
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.sergiodelapava.com/
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA Oct 2020
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1970, in NJ; married Susanna; children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended Brooklyn Law School.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and attorney. Public defender, New York, NY.
AWARDS:Robert W. Bingham Prize for best debut novel of the year, PEN, for A Naked Singularity.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Sergio De La Pava is a writer and attorney based in New Jersey. He works in New York City as a public defender. De la Pava holds a degree from Brooklyn Law School.
A Naked Singularity is De La Pava’s first novel. It was originally self-published, and the University of Chicago Press released it in 2012. The book finds Casi, the narrator and a rising public defender, dealing with his large Columbian family and a broken criminal justice system.
In an interview with Susanna Rustin, contributor to the London Guardian Online, De la Pava discussed his intentions for his book, stating: “Not that it’s perfect, but it’s what I set out to do. … I wanted it to have an angry, propulsive core but at the same time to be full of heart. It’s a difficult combination to pull off. You can do one or the other, and there are dangers with either, but I wanted both and when I finished I read it and I was like: ‘Oh yeah’.” De la Pava continued: “I wanted it to be funny, first of all because comedy is enjoyable and keeps you reading. I wanted it to be achingly accurate.” Regarding his commentary on the criminal justice system, De La Pava told Rustin: “I thought since I’m in this unique position where I actually do know what happens, intimately and accurately, let’s make sure my depiction doesn’t have the silly gloss that’s usually applied to these things.”
London Guardian reviewer, Stuart Kelly, suggested: “It is as if there are three separate novels trapped between two covers, or as if, fearful of never appearing in print, De la Pava thought he’d better get in everything, including the kitchen sink and the history of kitchen sinks. Sometimes, more is less. Caveats aside, this is a compelling debut. Ambition might outweigh execution (and indeed does so literally in the plot), but thank goodness for such ambition.” Jack Shreve, a critic in Library Journal, described the book as an “ambitious, inspired and always humorous novel of ideas.”Booklist writer, Brendan Driscoll, called it “one of those sprawling, hyperverbal stream-of-consciousness epics that sometimes seem infatuated with their own cleverness but … capture something profound.” “Its crazy, contemporary voice is so compelling and audacious that plodding through it to the end has its rewards,” asserted a contributor to Publishers Weekly.
Personae contains interlinked works, including a short story and a play. Characters include a detective named Helen Tame and a professor being pulled away from the shore while swimming.
Writing in the London Guardian, Edward Docx noted that Personae contained “page after page of superbly alive and intelligent writing that circles the deep and proper subjects of human nature, which are the deep and proper subjects of any writer who takes their work seriously.” “Inventive and unconventional, De La Pava’s second novel is chock-full of surprises,” remarked Miriam Tuliao in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly critic commented: “Game readers should have as much fun with this clever experiment as the author seems to have had inventing it.”
Set in Paterson, NJ, Lost Empress tells the story of a football strategist named Nina Gill and prisoner on Rikers Island named Nina DeAngeles.
In a lengthy interview with Tobias Carroll, contributor to the Longreads website, De la Pava discussed his decision to include a storyline on the NFL in the book. He stated: “I think what drew my attention was a kind of … a form of revolution and upending of the existing social order, let’s call it. Here you have by far the most successful sports league in our country and because of that success, it just feels monolithic and entrenched and not subject in any way to attack, and then you think, well, what’s the most ridiculous thing? There are indoor football leagues. There is, for example, the Arena League and things of that nature. They don’t in any way put any kind of dent in the NFL, but they do exist.” De la Pava continued: “The notion is taking this and having it stand in for other entrenched social systems that exist that feel invulnerable. So the notion is that, where you’re talking about revolution, you’re talking about upending, or you’re talking about a social upheaval, it never feels, certainly from the perspective of immediately prior to the revolution, like something that could ever possibly succeed in any way.” De la Pava also told Carroll: “What I’m looking for before I start the project is soil where things can grow. I’m looking for things like that, that are rich enough that for several years I’m going to be able to entertain myself, which is always my first goal. The NFL will always be the gift that keeps on giving just because it’s such a central part of our society.” Regarding the book’s setting, De La Pava stated: “Paterson’s a fascinating place. I went there a lot during the course of writing this novel. I think there’s a palpable energy there. It’s also a defeated energy, maybe. When you look at what Paterson was at one point. … It was a real hub of commerce and a genuine central city. It still is in many ways; it’s just changed with loss and sadness. That was always appealing.”
In a lengthy review of Lost Empress in the New Yorker, Dee Jonathan commented: “The style, of course, is the extraordinary thing, as it would need to be to unite all the elements of a novel of this length and sprawl. It is colloquial in tempo yet nerdy in content, divinely detached yet intimately casual in tone, impossibly learned and improvisational at the same time. If De La Pava has a signature move, it’s to zoom out from a highly specific action or bit of characterization in order to generalize about or extrapolate from it, while still holding on to the speech-replicating sentence structures that ground that action in a kind of conversational specificity.” “The incredible multiverse he constructs in this book establishes him as one of the most fearsomely talented American novelists working today,” asserted a Publishers Weekly writer. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a whirling vortex of a novel, confusing, misdirecting, and surprising—and a lot of fun.”
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De la Pava offers an existential nightmare in Every Arc Bends Its Radian, a mystery turned metaphysical adventure. Riv del Rio, a New Yorker of Colombian descent, leaves the city after his ex, Jane, unexpectedly dies. He arrives in Cali, Colombia, where he meets up with family friend Carlotta, who asks Riv, a poet and philosopher, to find her missing daughter, Angelica. With the help of his cousin Mauro, Riv learns that the evil and torturous criminal syndicate known as Mondragon, that has taken control of the town, has her. When Riv finds himself in the middle of Mondragon’s criminal empire, he’s unlikely to overpower anyone so he initiates a philosophical discussion. But soon Angelica appears. Brilliant and beautiful, she has transcended human existence to utilize her self-described Supra Hominin Cognition, which combines organic life and a computational brain. With her newfound abilities, she’s on a mission to extinguish humanity.
In an interview with Sam Franzini at Our Culture magazine, de la Pava described his influences for the villainous non-entity Mondragon: “Sadly, our world is full of Mondragons. The only question remaining is whether we will allow them to win; not looking good so far.” On his decision to explore the concept of reality, he said: “I suspect it’s more like there are varying levels of reality, all true in their special way, but most of them untrue in the ultimate ways that signify.”
Readers expecting a straightforward mystery will be disappointed, according to Publishers Weekly reviewer, who mentioned de la Pava’s “hodgepodge of moods and genres. Still, there’s no denying that this bizarre detective story holds a hypnotizing power all its own.” A Kirkus Reviews writer commented on the genre-hopping adventure and deux ex machina reveal, saying: “Put on your seat belt for this weirdly imaginative yarn and its endless hairpin twists and turns.” This existential detective thriller from an engaging writer gives off a fierce and consuming vibe, Library Journal critic Lisa Rohrbaugh reported, adding “This fantastical, spectacular, riveting tale is incredibly well-written.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2012, Brendan Driscoll, review of A Naked Singularity, p. 28; October 1, 2013, Miriam Tuliao, review of Personae, p. 32.
Economist, May 5, 2018, “Tick, Tock; Maximalist Fiction,” review of Lost Empress, p. 82.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of Lost Empress; September 1, 2024, review of Every Arc Bends Its Radian.
Library Journal, July 1, 2012, Jack Shreve, review of A Naked Singularity, p. 74; October 2024, Lisa Rohrbaugh, review of Every Arc Bends Its Radian, p. 108.
London Guardian, August 31, 2013, Stuart Kelly, review of A Naked Singularity, p. 13; November 23, 2013, Edward Docx, review of Personae, p. 12.
New Statesman, September 13, 2013, review of A Naked Singularity, p. 58.
New Yorker, May 7, 2018, Dee Jonathan, “Offensive Formation,” review of Lost Empress, p. 69.
Publishers Weekly, March 5, 2012, review of A Naked Singularity, p. 47; August 19, 2013, review of Personae, p. 38; April 2, 2018, review of Lost Empress, p. 41.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 2011, Tim Feeney, review of A Naked Singularity, p. 198.
Small Press Bookwatch, May, 2009, review of A Naked Singularity.
Xpress Reviews, June 8, 2018, Henry Bankhead, review of Lost Empress.
ONLINE
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 27, 2014), Susanna Rustin, author interview.
Longreads, https://longreads.com/ (May 16, 2018), Tobias Carroll, author interview. *
Our Culture, https://ourculturemag.com/ (November 22, 2024), Sam Franzini, “Author Spotlight: Sergio de la Pava, ‘Every Arc Bends Its Radian.’”
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (October 2, 2024), review of Every Arc Bends Its Radian.
Sergio de la Pava website, https://www.sergiodelapava.com/ (January 1, 2025).
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sergio de la Pava
Born 1970 or 1971 (age 53–54)
New Jersey
Occupation Writer, lawyer
Nationality American
Website
sergiodelapava.com
Sergio de la Pava (born 1970/71) is an American novelist and lawyer. He is best known for his novel A Naked Singularity.
Biography
Sergio de la Pava was born and raised in New Jersey, to parents who immigrated from Colombia. He attended Brooklyn Law School, where he met his wife. They live in New Jersey with their two children.[1]
He works as a public defender in Manhattan,[2] where he handles 70 to 80 cases at a time. He says of that work, "The stakes are a lot higher in that world than whether or not my book gets attention. On a given day, I have someone who really needs my help on a serious matter."[3]
Career
In 2008, De La Pava self-published his first novel, A Naked Singularity through XLibris.[4] In October 2010, literary site The Quarterly Conversation ran a review by Scott Bryan Wilson that called the book "one of the best and most original novels of the decade" and "a towering, impressive work."[5] That review caught the eye of staff at The University of Chicago Press, who signed the book up and published it in paperback in April 2012. The book was named one of the ten best works of fiction of 2012 by The Wall Street Journal.[6] In the Chicago Tribune, Julia Keller wrote, "A Naked Singularity is not about physics. It's about the American criminal justice system in a large and chaotic city, a place slowly crushed by hopelessness in the same way that an ancient star is gradually crushed by gravity. . . . It is about a city that teeters on the edge of total collapse and complete disaster, but that has the capacity to right itself (whew!) at the last possible second."[1] A Naked Singularity went on to win the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize from PEN as the best debut novel of that year.[7] On February 10, 2014, it was named one of eight books on the shortlist for the inaugural Folio Prize for the best book published in the United Kingdom in 2013.[8]
In April 2011, De La Pava self-published his second novel, Personae. The University of Chicago Press published a new paperback edition of that book in September 2013. In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks wrote, "[I]n this willfully cryptic book, Mr. De La Pava's sense of moral urgency is ever-present. In only his early 40s, he is already a writer of mercurial brilliance, and even his strangest detours are worth following",[9] and Bookforum called it " the most galvanizing meditation on the possibilities and ramifications of artistic process that I have read in recent memory."[10]
Works
Novels
2008: A Naked Singularity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) ISBN 978-0-226-14179-4
2011: Personae (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) ISBN 978-0-226-07899-1
2018: Lost Empress (Pantheon)[11]
2024: Every Arc Bends its Radian (Simon & Schuster)
Articles and essays
2010: "A Day's Sail", published by Triple Canopy [12]
Author Spotlight: Sergio de la Pava, ‘Every Arc Bends Its Radian’
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by
Sam Franzini
November 22, 2024
When Riv del Rio flies back to Cali, Colombia, fleeing an ugly breakup, he has no idea about the journey he’s about to take. His cousin sets him up with work — finding a local woman’s daughter, an intelligent woman who has been missing for a while. Seems easy enough, but as Riv finds himself more enmeshed with the story of the town and the underlying criminal activities within it, he seems to realize he’s out of his league, but not before he comes face to face with the Earth’s darkest secrets and unlikely realities. Funny, philosophical, and genuinely mind-bending, Sergio de la Pava’s Every Arc Bends Its Radian constantly surprises and shocks.
Our Culture chatted with Sergio de la Pava over email about conversations, arguing, and genre.
Congrats on your new novel! How has the reception been so far?
Well, that’s really none of my business, is it? If someone says I messed with their head,
or words to that effect, then I guess success. Either way the globe will keep spinning
undeterred and largely undetected.
Riv is such an interesting narrator; he’s pulled to his homeland of Colombia, half fleeing a breakup, half to look for other work. When did he start to form in your mind?
Riv seems the reactionary type. Events form him at least as much as he initiates them. So I’ll say he started forming on that flight to Cali.
I like that the book is mostly dialogue — he trades off jabs with his friends and later foes with really clever ideas. What goes into one of your conversations?
I respond best to conversations where you feel the parties have arduously reasoned the matter through for themselves well beforehand and are just now filling us in.
Each chapter begins with an ‘argument’, a kind of motto that determines how he acts in the world. Some interesting ones assert ‘How any misgiving, if properly investigated, is empirically sound,’ or ‘The world as a kind of sleight of hand.’ How did this structure influence the novel’s themes?
These arguments seem to be able to exist out of time, as it were, to comment helpfully on what then unfolds. The words entry and argument helpfully have multiple meanings and connotations and it’s mostly left to the reader to disseminate this ambiguity as they see fit.
The book takes a bizarre turn that I didn’t see coming where Riv comes face-to-face with the criminal syndicate Mondragon, a villainous non-entity he’s been tracking down. Were there any real-life influences for this character?
Sadly, our world is full of Mondragons. The only question remaining is whether we will allow them to win; not looking good so far.
Even though it starts out as a detective novel, you really subvert it by adding body horror and bold ideas, along with becoming a thriller towards the end. Did you set out to write something kind of difficult to classify?
The kind of classification you’re talking about is, above all, unnatural. Genre works are very careful about their rules. How depressing, it ain’t me.
One of the book’s main ideas is that reality as we know it is not as it seems — you certainly make a parallel as the book peels back more and more layers. Why did you want to explore this idea?
I suspect it’s more like there are varying levels of reality, all true in their special way, but most of them untrue in the ultimate ways that signify.
You also touch on artificial intelligence and superhuman cognition, the origins of humanity. Was this inspired by the recent upticks in AI research?
Novels mostly have to opt out of current events. This one’s no different as its inventions predate the rise in notoriety you’re referencing.
So many ideas come together towards the end, I kind of picture you as someone who works out philosophical ideas through fiction — they’re definitely picked apart and examined from every angle. Is this a correct read?
It’s correct in that I know a lot more about what I believe at the end of a novel than I do at the outset. But it can be difficult, even for me, to tease out what’s motivation and what’s byproduct.
Finally, what’s next? Are you thinking of any themes for the next work?
How much of what we call romantic love is bound up in notions like loyalty and erasure of self?
Every Arc Bends Its Radian is out now.
De La Pava, Sergio. Every Arc Bends Its Radian. S. & S. Nov. 2024. 288p. ISBN 9781668056707. $27.99. F
Readers will want to strap in tight as De La Pava (Lost Empress) takes them on a wild, turbulent ride with a likable narrator, Rivilerto "Riv" del Rio, who is both a private eye and a philosophical poet. Escaping New York City after the untimely death of his partner, Jane, he finds himself on a quest. A family friend, Carlotta, wants Riv to locate her daughter Angelica, who has disappeared. Riv's investigations lead him to Exeter Mondragon, an expert criminal who rightly calls himself "pure evil." This mystery tale turns into something else as Riv's prolonged conversation with Mondragon turns to the breakthrough technology of supra hominin cognition (SHC.) SHC combines a human body with an all-knowing computational brain. The narrative plummets, alongside Riv, to the ocean floor in a tiny submersible as the novel draws to an end. VERDICT This fantastical, spectacular, riveting tale is incredibly well-written, and it gives off a vibe that is fiercely intense and consuming. An existential detective thriller from an engaging writer and thinker.--Lisa Rohrbaugh
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Rohrbaugh, Lisa. "De La Pava, Sergio. Every Arc Bends Its Radian." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 10, Oct. 2024, p. 108. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813629187/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f2a7bc49. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
de la Pava, Sergio EVERY ARC BENDS ITS RADIAN Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $27.99 11, 12 ISBN: 9781668056707
A genre-hopping sojourn in a Colombia both real and improbable.
A New Jersey native of Colombian descent, de la Pava opens with a touch of the roman à clef: "The airport in Cali. It's been an era since I've been, so the sight of so many authorized machine guns unsettles at first." The story quickly morphs as the protagonist, Riv del Río, is called on to exercise his skills as a private eye. He's an existential one at that, de la Pava seasoning his now-noirish broth with dashes of Roberto Bolaño and Arturo Pérez-Reverte: As Riv puts it, searching for documentation on the missing young woman he's been hired to find, "Mysteriously evanesce into invisibility one day and a single sheet of paper will replace you. And eventually no one will read it unless someone like me comes in and asks." That young woman is beautiful and brilliant, so much so that she scorns her MIT teachers with a taunting note on her thesis proposal: "I don't expect you to understand." Riv traces Angelica's disappearance to a preternaturally evil crime lord who, boasting of having killed God, is worshipped by minions and fed grapes by "barely clad women." Exeter Mondragon may be Satan in a caftan, but he's no match for Angelica, who turns up in a deus ex machina moment that recalls the bizarre science fiction conclusion of the film version of Peter Høeg's novelSmilla's Sense of Snow. Angelica, who's cooked up a program she calls Supra Hominin Cognition--don't ask--harbors plans that include the mass extermination of humankind, about which Riv muses, once the dust has settled, "Sure, she wanted to eradicate us all, but not like I'm perfect."
Put on your seat belt for this weirdly imaginative yarn and its endless hairpin twists and turns.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"de la Pava, Sergio: EVERY ARC BENDS ITS RADIAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A806452760/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=48fbf070. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Every Arc Bends Its Radian
Sergio de la Pava. Simon & Schuster, $27.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-6680-5670-7
What begins as a familiar PI tale morphs into a Pynchonesque nightmare in this confounding concoction from de la Pava (Lost Empress). Riv del Rio has come from New York City to Cali, Colombia, to escape a recent trauma. He quickly reconnects with his cousin Mauro and an older family friend named Carlotta, who asks Riv, a self-described “poet/philosopher/private eye,” to track down her missing daughter, Angelica. With Mauro’s help, Riv determines that Angelica is being held by Exeter Mondragon, a sadistic crime lord with a self-stated mission to “deepen despair, misery, horror.” Though Riv acknowledges he stands little chance of rescuing Angelica, he enters Mondragon’s lair and is promptly captured, with Mondragon laying out an elaborate plan to torture and kill him over the course of 18 hours. Mondragon’s agenda changes, however, when Angelica reemerges, and the story takes a hard turn into the realm of speculative fiction. The narrative momentum is frequently stalled by Riv’s philosophical musings (“Whenever illegitimate power is exercised, the universe grants us the opposite power to author its disruption”), and readers looking for a straightforward mystery will be frustrated by de la Pava’s hodgepodge of moods and genres. Still, there’s no denying that this bizarre detective story holds a hypnotizing power all its own. (Nov.)
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Reviewed on: 10/02/2024
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Downloadable Audio - 978-1-7971-8503-3
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