***Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Best Debut Novel of 2012 ***Wall Street Journal 10 Best Fiction Books of 2012 ***2014 Folio Prize Shortlist A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender–one who, tellingly has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack–and how his world then slowly devolves. It’s a huge, ambitious novel clearly in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, and it’s told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel. If Infinite Jest stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew our trajectory from there, A Naked Singularity does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, a character sneers, “Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law.” A Naked Singularity reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law.

From the acclaimed PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize-winning author of A Naked Singularity, a shockingly hilarious novel that tackles, with equal aplomb, both America’s most popular sport and its criminal justice system
 
From Paterson, New Jersey, to Rikers Island to the streets of New York City, Sergio de la Pava’s Lost Empress introduces readers to a cast of characters unlike any other in modern fiction: dreamers and exiles, immigrants and night-shift workers, a lonely pastor and others on the fringes of society—each with their own impact on the fragile universe they navigate.
 
Nina Gill, daughter of the aging owner of the Dallas Cowboys, was instrumental in building her father’s dynasty. So it’s a shock when her brother inherits the franchise and she is left with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey’s failing Indoor Football League team. Nina vows to take on the NFL and make the Paterson Pork pigskin kings of America. All she needs to do is recruit the coach, the players, and the fans.
 
Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles—a brilliant and lethal criminal mastermind—has been imprisoned on Rikers Island for a sensational offense. Nuno fights for his liberty—while simultaneously planning an even more audacious crime.
 
In Lost Empress, de la Pava weaves a narrative that encompasses Salvador Dalí, Joni Mitchell, psychiatric help, emergency medicine, religion, theoretical physics, and everything in between. With grace, humor, and razor-sharp prose, all these threads combine, counting down to an epic and extraordinary conclusion.

Cast of Narrators:
main narration, by Edoardo Ballerini
Nina Gill, read by Carol Monda
Dia Nouveau, read by Brittany Pressley
Nuno de Angeles, read by James Fouhey
Major Harris, read by Bob Bray
Daniel Gill, read by Richard Topol
Sharon Seaborg, read by Quincy T. Bernstine
Hugh Seaborg, read by Ryan Anderson
Coach Elkins, read by Richard Ferrone
Feniz Heredia, read by Tony Chiroldes
Larry Brown, read by Jeff Gurner
Travis Mena, read by Dan Bittner
Nelson Cervantes, read by Gonzalo Ingram 
Solomon Hanes, read by David LeDoux
Reeves, read by Leo Coltrane
Ed Coin, read by Johnny Heller
Father Ventimiglia, read by Mark McCarthy
The Theorist, read by Geoffrey Campbell
Nina’s Father, read by Richard Poe

and with additional roles read by some of the above and by Francisco Burgos, Christina Delaine, Jim Frangione, Tavia Gilbert, Lianna Gomori, Pete Larkin, Angel Saldana, Adriana Sananes, Brandon Ruben, Paul Ruben, and the author, Sergio de la Pava.