Jesse Browner is the author of the novels The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today, among others, as well as of the memoir How Did I Get Here?
He is also the translator of works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Matthieu Ricard and other French literary masters. He lives in New York City.
Browner's new novel is Sing to Me.
Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Browner's reply.
You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue. This is already my second read. My hands-down favorite book of 2024. It reinvents the story ofWriters Read: Jesse Browner (January 2012).Hernán Cortés’ first week in Tenochtitlan and his meeting with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma – probably one of the most fateful encounters in world history, as the future of the entire New World hung on its outcome. Yet Enrigue treats it with irreverence, irony, broad (almost slapstick) humor and compassion for all its protagonists. For me, You Dreamed of Empires is the ideal model of the historical novel, adhering to the few known facts yet freely acknowledging that all history is, first and foremost, an elaborate work of fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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