A mythological excavation and political reckoning, Under the World is the second instalment in Oscar Guardiola-Rivera's experimental Night of the World trilogy.

Drawing on the Mayan creation epic Popol Vuh, the book follows Hoodoo Girl and the trickster Ix through a landscape of gods, lovers, colonial violence and historical transformation. Its narrative moves between the ancient and contemporary Americas, where the dead remain politically active and the past refuses to stay buried. Guardiola-Rivera works in a hybrid form somewhere between poetry, speculative fiction, philosophical inquiry and political manifesto. Rather than following a conventional plot, the text unfolds through fragments, shifting voices, incantations and rhythmic repetitions. Questions of conquest, liberation, desire and collective memory emerge through a cosmology in which human history cannot be separated from mythology, the natural world or the supernatural.

An unusual and formally ambitious work from the independent publisher the87press, Under the World approaches Latin American history not as a completed account of colonial devastation, but as an unfinished struggle over the possibilities of the present. Literature becomes a means of unsettling inherited histories and imagining what might emerge from beneath them.

Edition/Condition: the87press, 2024. First edition, paperback. Very good condition, with minor signs of handling. Interior appears clean and unmarked.