megan mcdowell

From Carlos Fonseca, author of Colonel Lágrimas, comes Natural History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities. Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator's fascination with the hidden forms of the animal kingdom — with camouflage and subterfuge — and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the form of which itself remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the death of the designer, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he…