Dibs

When he’s not fomenting Mexican revolution as the spearhead of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), appearing sporadically masked with knives at his waist and a bullet-belt slung around his neck, accompanied by his deformed-rooster mascot, elusive guerrilla Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos is a novelist. Due in September from New York’s Akashic Books, The Uncomfortable Dead is a “highly anticipated surreal noir collaboration between Mexico’s greatest writer and its most courageous revolutionary,” according to a press release. Coauthored with award-winning mystery writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, it’s “an uproarious murder mystery” in which “an odd but charming mountain man” meets a Coke-swilling sleuth in Mexico City’s mean streets, where both find themselves “in an unpredictable dance of death with forces at once criminal, historical, and political. Readers expecting political heavy-handedness will be disarmed by the humility and playful self-mocking that runs throughout the book,” Akashic reassures us. Neal Pollack, blurbing the book, adds: “It’s a singular event in world literature.”