Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue’s fiction fixates on “the slippery relationship between history, mythmaking, and literature.” Over the course of seven novels and two short-story collections, he has playfully interrogated how Mexicans have thought about and told the story of their country’s origins. In his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, Enrigue takes this interest to a new extreme: He portrays a single and monumental day in the life of Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors just as they arrived in the city of Tenochtitlan in 1519. “By depicting a moment when many outcomes were still possible—the Spanish invaders, vastly outnumbered, could easily have been killed,” Lucas Iberico Lozada writes in his review for Books & the Arts, “the novel tells a history without victors and losers.” Enrigue aspires to offer a history in which such matters are not yet fully disclosed, in which we still remained surprised by those stories that explain where we come from and where we might still be going. “Enrigue’s reimagination of the past proposes that we suspend our attachment to the familiar story,” Lozado tells us, in order to “make room for new ones in the future.” Read “The Mexican Conquest: A Story Told in the Conditional Tense”