Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is an electric, highly anticipated novel set in Colombia’s underground queer scene, from the award-winning author of Fiebre Tropical.
Hurry up and add this title to your “TBR” list! Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You by Julian Delgado Lopera is in presale and generating serious buzz. This novel from Liveright | W.W. Norton set for publication May 26, 2026, has early readers buzzing. We’re here to show you what’s on the book cover, from the publisher’s official description to the early reviews making this book is one you want to pre-order today. Here we go!
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In This Spotlight On Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You
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About Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You
It is a known fact that the queens who refuse their destiny are haunted. Rejection turns itself inward, a bullet to the heart of said queen, and unleashes, per Travesti Lore, a river of curses.
Cloistered in a dreary Bogotá apartment, Ignacio’s light has dimmed, leaving his teenage daughter, Valentina, to raise herself in the wake of her mother Alma’s death. Lonely and love-starved, Valentina aches to discover the details of her mother’s drowning, and for her father to snap out of his depression. But Ignacio can’t. He spends listless afternoons smoking cigarettes in long blonde wigs, telenovelas humming in the background, haunted not only by matrimonial guilt, but by memories of a young man he once loved and betrayed.
From Ignacio’s tragic past emerges the luminous queen of Bogotá’s queer underground, Mamadora Eléctrica, the wise travesti who he first met under the silvery lights of Club Aquario when he was just a shy country boy. With Alma gone, Mamadora steps in as a mother figure to Valentina the way she once did for the girl’s father. But as an expert in Travesti Lore, she fears the worst: that Ignacio’s self-destruction may have unleashed a curse on them all.
From “a writer who is grinding their own colors” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is a profound and richly imagined story about coming undone.
Praise for Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You
In Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You, “Delgado Lopera dives into Colombia’s taboo queer culture in this scintillating narrative of a man torn between belonging and self-expression . . . The author’s turns of phrase are striking and indelible, and the characters are deeply and lovingly portrayed . . . It’s exquisite.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Set in 1990s Bogotá, readers follow father and daughter Ignacio and Valentina as they traverse grief, depression, gender, and the yearning to self-actualize amid a civil war. Their tales intertwine, transporting the reader between decades and memories, all through Spanglish prose . . . Ultimately, the novel is about what happens when someone rejects their queer destiny — and more importantly, what happens to descendants who are left to grapple with intergenerational suppression.”—Quispe López – them
“A colorful, dazzling new novel from the award-winning author of Fiebre Tropical. This book takes place in Colombia’s underground queer scene and tackles self-loathing with equal measure of earnestness and irreverence.”—Queerty, “Our Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of 2026”
“Every once in a while you come across a book so bursting with life that the pages seem to be sprouting, delivered in a never-heard-before idiom that must have been invented just to transmit so much aliveness. Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is that book and Julián Delgado Lopera is one of the most exciting writers in all the Americas.”—Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance and Detransition, Baby
“Delgado Lopera is a writer whose sentences make your heart race, and Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You, with its unmasking of lies, makings of new truths, insights into the human heart, is generous, imaginative, revelatory, enraging, and loving. Read it and let the lightning of its prose bring you alive again.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
“Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You has it all: sequins and pelucas, secrets and sorrow. Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel burns with the fever of Bogotá’s queer underground while laying bare the ache of fractured families. . . . This is a work as innovative in voice as it is fearless in heart.” -Alex Espinoza, author of The Sons of El Rey
“A linguistic marvel of collective consciousness.”—Sarah Schulman, author of The Cosmopolitans
“A thrilling ride, not only through the farmlands and cities of Colombia, but through time’s imperfect vessel, life. . . . Julián Delgado Lopera has gifts to spare, and this classic novel [Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You] is a present for us all.”—Alejandro Varela, author of Middle Spoon
“A perfectly calibrated novel that captures the gritty contours of masculinity and homophobia in Colombia through lush, lyric, and irresistible prose. . . . We are braver and freer because of the novel Julián Delgado Lopera has written.”—Ruben Reyes Jr., author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven and Archive of Unknown Universes
Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is “A majestic and otherworldly novel of first love, longing for family and escape, and the struggle to release the ghosts we carry. . . . This novel is a torrential downpour that will leave you trembling toward your own freedom.”—Santiago Jose Sanchez, author of Hombrecito
About Julian Delgado Lopera, Author of Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You
Julian Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer and historian based in San Francisco. Delgado Lopera is the author of the novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press 2020), as well as the nonfiction books Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute Books 2017). Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Mag, among others. Delgado Lopera is formerly the creative director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary nonprofit in San Francisco. Born and raised in Colombia, Julián teaches Creative Writing at CUNY. He lives in Brooklyn.
You can connect with Julián Delgado Lopera on their website, and on Instagram.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Liveright | W.W. Norton
ISBN Hardcover 9781324097204
Pub Date: May 26, 2026
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As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, Malaprop’s, Books-A-Million, Audiobooks.com, Chirp, 2nd & Charles, Amazon, NameHero, Envato, and Place-It, LitStack may earn a commission—at no cost to you—when you purchase through our affiliate links. We appreciate the brands we work with, and also appreciate that using our affiliate links may help you find your next great read, a book or two or more, in whatever form, while simultaneously supporting LitStack. When you use our affiliate links, you help keep LitStack running—and for that, we thank you.
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