Two Sherpas - Paperback

by Sebastián Martínez Daniell (Author), Jennifer Croft (Translator)

Mount Everest, and all it means to royalty, explorers, imperialists, and two sherpas, perched on a cliffside, waiting for a man on the ledge below to move.

A British climber has fallen from a cliffside in Nepal, and lies inert on a ledge below. Two sherpas kneel at the edge, stand, exchange the odd word, waiting for him to move, to make a decision, to descend. In those minutes, the world opens up to Kathmandu, a sun-bleached beach town on another continent, and the pages of Julius Caesar. Mountaineering, colonialism, obligation--in Sebastián Martínez Daniell's effortless prose each breath is crystalline, and the whole world is visible from here.

Author Biography

Sebastián Martínez Daniell was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. He has published four novels, Semana (Week, 2004), Precipitaciones aisladas (Isolated Showers, 2010), Dos Sherpas (Two Sherpas, 2018) and Desintegración en una caja (2024; forthcoming from Charco Press as Disintegration in a Box ). His work has also been included in anthologies such as Buenos Aires / Escala 1:1 (2007), Uno a uno (2008), Hablar de mí (2010) and Golpes . Relatos y memorias de la dictadura (2016). He is one of the co-founders of the independent publisher Entropía and is a literature lecturer at the National University of the Arts in Buenos Aires.

Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University and is a Presidential Professor at the University of Tulsa.