Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop Small Sale
Shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks. Don’t miss out—purchases support local bookstores.
Shop the sale
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayThe Polish Boxer
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
The Polish Boxer covers a vast landscape of human experience while enfolding a search for origins: a grandson tries to make sense of his grandfather's past and the story behind his numbered tattoo; a Serbian classical pianist longs for his forbidden heritage; a Mayan poet is torn between his studies and filial obligations; a striking young Israeli woman seeks answers in Central America; a university professor yearns for knowledge that he can't find in books and discovers something unexpected at a Mark Twain conference. Drawn to what lies beyond the range of reason, they all reach for the beautiful and fleeting, whether through humor, music, poetry, or unspoken words. Across his encounters with each of them, the narrator—a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon—pursues his most enigmatic subject: himself.
Mapping the geography of identity in a world scarred by a legacy of violence and exile, The Polish Boxer marks the debut of a major new Latin American voice in English.
Eduardo Halfon was born in Guatemala City, moved to the United States with his family at the age of ten, went to school in South Florida, studied industrial engineering at North Carolina State University, and then returned to Guatemala to teach literature for eight years at Universidad Francisco Marroquín. Named one of best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá, he is also the recipient of the prestigious José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. Although bilingual, Halfon chooses to write in Spanish and has published nine books of fiction. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on continuing the story The Polish Boxer, which is inspired by his own family history and is the first of his novels to be published in English. Halfon currently lives in Nebraska and travels frequently to Guatemala.
Armando Durán has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.
Daniel Hahn is the translator of Agualusa’s award-winning novels Creole and The Book of Chameleons, as well as My Father’s Wives.
Oliver Shah is the award-winning City Editor of The Sunday Times and one of the most respected national commentators on business and the high street. He was named business journalist of the year at the 2017 Press Awards for his investigation into Philip Green and was named business journalist of the year at the 2017 London Press Club Awards. Shah has been interviewed on Radio Four's Today Programme, BBC News, BBC Five Live and Sky News. He studied English Literature at Cambridge University and journalism at City University before joining City AM in 2009 and The Sunday Times in 2010. Aged 33, Shah lives in east London.
Lisa Dillman is a translator from Spanish and Catalan and a lecturer at Emory University.
Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña, Spain in 1967. Before devoting himself full-time to his fiction and poetry, he worked for many years as an experimental physicist. His collected poems were published in Spain in 2012.
Thomas Bunstead has translated Enrique Vila-Matas, Aixa de la Cruz, Eduardo Halfon, Yuri Herrera, and Rodrigo Fresán. His own writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review Daily, and TheIndependent on Sunday.
Anne McLean has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice, as well as the Premio Valle Inclán. She has translated the works of Javier Cercas, Julio Cortázar, Carmen Martin Gaite, Ignacio Padilla, and Evelio Rosero.
Reviews
“A book that willfully and delightfully blurs the boundaries among novel, memoir, and meditation…A key pleasure of The Polish Boxer is that of revelation…The power of The Polish Boxer is that it is always rooted in the personal. It is deeply accessible, deeply moving.”
“Funny and revelatory…As borders, physical and mental, are crossed and redrawn, the stories Eduardo tells us and tells himself are revealed to be not just partial but also fantastical, false. The Polish boxer? There may never have been one. Yet this in no way diminishes the pleasure Halfon’s myriad stories afford.”
“Elegant.”
“These are the stories of life…The fictional makes the real bearable and intelligible.”
“Armando Duran shows admirable restraint in his performance of the diverse works. His perfect American accent sharply contrasts with his elegant Spanish pronunciation of names and phrases. Duran sensitively balances Halfon’s dual messages of melancholy and wonder with a vocal wit that blurs the realms between memoir and fiction.”
“Halfon passionately and lyrically illustrates the significance of the journey and the beauty of true mystery. The Polish Boxer is sublime and arresting and will linger with readers who will be sure to revisit it again and again.”
“This first English translation of Halfon’s work is highly readable and engaging, partly owing to the careful work by a team of five translators; on an aesthetic note, its disruption of genre categories provides readers food for thought about the nature of literary creations.”
“Brilliant…Opens with one of the best classroom scenes I’ve ever read.”
“Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.”
“Eduardo Halfon’s prose is delicate, precise, and as ineffable as precocious art—a lighthouse that illuminates everything.”
“Eduardo Halfon belongs to a new generation of Latin American writers who, from the beginning, demonstrate an impeccable mastery of their craft, without any hesitation in the use of language.”
“The Polish Boxer is an enchanting, unclassifiable book of encounters, impressions, and improvisations: a book for the ages, which can be read in one sitting, and then again, and again, and again.”
“It is not often that one encounters such a mix of personal engagement and literary passion, or pain and tenderness.”
Expand reviews
Stock up with our Shop Small Sale!
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks