Hernan Diaz edits an academic journal for Columbia University and is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury, 2012). His first novel, In the Distance, was a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of 2017 and a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has been published by The Kenyon Review, Playboy, Granta, and The Paris Review.
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In the DistanceA Novel
Often, the three of them—burro, horse, rider—would simply stand in the middle of the plains. Aside from the occasional sigh or the halfhearted attempt at swatting away an insect, they all stood still, staring into the avoid. Brown flats, blue wall. From his animals, with their serenely sad, bulge-eyed gaze, Håkan seemed to have learned to gape into space. To this absent expression, he added a drooping jaw. They merely stood, completely absorbed by nothing. Time dissolved into the sky. There was little difference between landscape and spectators. Insensible things that existed in one another.
In the Distance:A Novel -
In the DistanceA Novel
The hare, like a blade of grass or a piece of coal, is not simply a small fraction of the whole but contains the whole within itself. This makes us all one. If anything, because we are all made of the same stuff. Our flesh is the debris of dead stars, and this is also true of the apple and its tree, of each hair on the spider’s legs, and of the rock rusting on planet Mars. Each minuscule being has spokes radiating out to all of creation. Some of the raindrops falling on the potato plants in your farm back in Sweden were once in a tiger’s bladder.
In the Distance:A Novel -
In the DistanceA Novel
He had withered and wrinkled—the sun had burned deep crevices into his face. His eyes were permanently screwed up, but not as the result of a deliberate frown. This was just his face now, creased by the constant squint of someone facing an overwhelming light or an unsolvable problem. And his gaze, almost invisible in the narrow trench under his knit and ribbed brown, was no longer fearful or curious, but dispassionately hungry. For what, he could not tell.
In the Distance:A Novel
“An affecting oddness is the great virtue of In the Distance, along with its wrenching evocations of its main character’s loneliness and grief. And its ability to create lustrous mindscapes from wide-open spaces, from voids that are never empty.” —Lawrence Downes, The New York Times
“Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance is exquisite: assured, moving, and masterful, as profound and precise an evocation of loneliness as any book I’ve ever read.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“Perhaps most striking is Diaz’s ability to describe the known as unknown, the all too familiar when it is yet unfamiliar. The nature of his protagonist, Håkan Söderström, a lost and wandering Swedish immigrant in the rough, largely uninhabited American territory, allows Diaz to write of what it is like to encounter the foreign or forgotten, such that the reader has a similarly enlightening experience, encountering it anew.” —Joel Pinckney, Paris Review Daily [on In the Distance]
Selected Works
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Hernan Diaz explores two kinds of wilderness: the immensely taxing newness of the American West and the still-forming interiority of Håkan, a Swedish immigrant desperate to find a way back home. It’s the second that makes the first feel new. He does this in language that can be plainspoken and wildly, even cosmically, evocative. Håkan’s epic journey reminds us how the self is often hammered into existence by pain and longing. In the end the reader understands the country’s twin potential for horror and hope.