The Queens’ Ball
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The first English translation of Copi’s comic masterpiece, a careening pyrotechnic picaresque across France, America, and Ibiza.
Set among the flamboyant demi-monde of the 1970s Paris underground, The Queens’ Ball follows the narrator Copi in his attempt to write a novel as life comes undone around him. His Roman lover Pietro is stolen by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator whose coterie take up residence in Copi’s flat and pump out low-budget pornographic rags and films. His friends leave him, burnt out from the theatrical excess of the decade. And worst of all his editor keeps calling him, demanding to know where the book is. Propelled by Copi’s careening prose and incisive humor, The Queens’ Ball swerves from Paris to Ibiza to New York and back again in a whirlwind frenzy of love, loss, and madness. Featuring an illuminating critical appendix by Copi’s current French editor, Thibaud Croisy, Kit Schluter’s rhapsodic translation marks the début of Copi’s world-renowned fiction in English.
Copi
Born in Buenos Aires in 1939, Raúl Damonte Botana derived his sobriquet Copi from a nickname his grandmother gave him, "copito de nieve," or "little snowflake." At six, he went into exile with his family in Uruguay and eventually settled in Paris, where he was a cartoonist, performer, playwright, and novelist until his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1987.
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Kit Schluter
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Kit Schluter is the author of Cartoons (City Lights, 2024) and has recently translated books from the French and Spanish by Copi, bruno darío, Rafael Bernal, Mario Levrero, Marcel Schwob, Olivia Tapiero, and Enrique Vila-Matas. He lives in Mexico City.
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