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Interstellar via Invisible Cities: spec-fic translated from Spanish imagines life on another planet.
An archeologist travels to a distant planet to spend time among a mysterious community: a people who live in temperature-controlled domes, worship a deity called Dog, and repeat an elliptical phrase from which they draw their name: mulai, the tree comes. The descendants of a long-forgotten space mission, the Mulai have abandoned the social norms that once bound them to Earth.
Over centuries of isolation, their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, write, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. As the archeologist records his attempts to understand their world – a strange negative of our own – questions of translation, meaning-making, and the ultimate precarity of civilization come to the fore.
Drawing on Borges, Le Guin, and Calvino, The Mulai is a mind-bending work of metafiction whose interlocking puzzles resound with Munir Hachemi’s singularly playful and eclectic style.
'[S]tartling, hopeful, speculative ... a daring novel narrated in strange and twisting language.' – Michelle Schingler, Forward Reviews ★ STARRED REVIEW
'I suspect it is going to stay with me … After finishing the book, I felt dazed for the rest of the day.' – Niall Harrison, Locus Magazine
'Hachemi (in a lovely and undoubtedly exhausting translation by Julia Sanches) never loses sight of the play that is so important in writing good science-fiction. You can almost feel the author grinning at you as you read, and I daresay you’ll end up grinning back by the end.' – Drew Broussard, Literary Hub
‘In The Mulai, Munir Hachemi conjures a mythic future history with all the heartbreak, mystery and absurdity of truth. With cheeky brilliance (and with translator Julia Sanches as a hovering ghost-in-the-machine presence), Hachemi co-opts the tropes of ethnography and intergalactic colonialism to imagine a queer, eschatological Eden, where culture is story and story is an alchemical compost pile of language decomposed and recomposed.’ – Anne de Marcken, author of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
'It’s a wild, insightful, and impressive work.' – Publishers Weekly
‘Munir Hachemi has created an interplanetary cargo cult and I’m ready to sign up. This exuberant voyage through space and time destabilizes our understanding of human (and not-so-human) civilization and religion through endlessly inventive riffs on language, translation and intertextuality. Julia Sanches’ playful, acrobatic rendering is the perfect accompaniment to this wild ride.’ – Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency
‘The Mulai is a fascinating exploration of the many languages, fears, and desires that give rise to a culture – and to the very experience of what we call literature. Munir Hachemi writes with a fresh, original voice that calls to mind Saer, Borges, Calvino, and the finest speculative fiction.’ – Simón López Trujillo, author of Pedro the Vast
'The type of speculative fiction that I yearn for! Weird, bold, and impossible to describe in the length of a shelf talker. For fans of linguistics, ethnography, unreliable narration, everything it can mean to be human, what it means to be a community, and anyone dreaming of something beyond the crushing weight of our current system.' – Billie Egret, Third Place Books
'An interesting look on how culture and language might evolve when it is broken off from the main society for many years. I really enjoyed this!' – Books & Company
Praise for the Author:
‘Living Things turns out to be both highbrow and hair-raising (and exceptionally well translated by Julia Sanches). In only 120 pages it succeeds in several separate ways: as an eco-thriller exposing the horrors of industrialized meat production and agrochemicals; as a treatise on rendering truth in fiction; and, not least, as a “lads on tour” caper.’ – Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement
‘[An] impetuous, upstart spirit infuses this short and spunky tale about young, would-be literary men who hit the road in search of adventure but find bleakness and exploitation… Hachemi’s is the sort of writing that compulsively interrogates itself as writing, in which literary theorizing runs alongside the storytelling… Hachemi’s documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labor compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go.’ – Rob Doyle, The New York Times
‘Gorgeously labyrinthine.’ – Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind on Living Things
‘Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I’ve read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world.’ – Dizz Tate, author of Brutes
‘Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It’s a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description.’ – James Greer, author of Bad Eminence
Munir Hachemi’s career as a writer began with them selling their stories in the form of fanzines in the bars of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid. They are the author of Cosas vivas (2018, translated as Living Things, 2024) and El árbol viene (2023, translated as The Mulai, 2026), and are also a translator from Chinese and English. In 2021, they appeared on Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list.
Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Born in Brazil, she currently resides in the United States.