Sergio de la Pava Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of PEN America Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Sergio de la Pava is best known as an American lawyer and novelist who made his name with his novel A Naked Singularity. The man was born to Colombian immigrants from New Jersey where he spent much of his childhood. For his undergraduate studies, he went to Rutgers before he went to Brooklyn Law School. While studying law at Brooklyn Law School, he met the young woman who would later become his wife and the mother of his two children. Even though he gained much notoriety with his novel A Naked Singularity which he self-published, he still works as a public defender in New York, and over his career, he has handled more than 15000 cases. He continues to work in the public defender’s office as he believes the stakes are much higher for people who cannot afford to get legal representation than for people who just need an entertainment fix.

De la Pava was just eight years old when he was bit by the writing bug while spending time with relatives in Colombia. Desperate to read a work not written in Spanish, he went to his grandfather’s home library where he found a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. On the back of the book was the picture of the author and this was the first time he came to understand the notion of an author. From reading the work, he started thinking that he would want to someday be the reason something just as good existed. While he began writing novels while still very young, by the time the 80s rolled around and he went to Rutgers, he had also developed a strong public interest bent. It was Sergio de la Pava’s passion for the public interest that would motivate him to go through law school and ultimately work in the public defender’s office defending indigent clients. He has often said that he finds a thrill in providing legal representation for people in deep trouble and this has become something of an addiction.

In 1999, Sergio de la Pava who was then in his twenties and working as a defense lawyer in Manhattan began writing his first novel. Since he was too busy with work, he never set himself rigid schedules as he used to write while waiting around in court and on the train going to work and back home. During this time, he used to represent the addicted, poor, ill, and desperate, and hence this novel was to be an attack on the justice system in the US. By 2004, he had risen through the ranks to become a legal aid office supervising attorney. He had also written 270,000 words of his novel, which was quite humongous for a literary work. But the biggest problem was that no one wanted to publish it and over three years, he got eighty-eight rejections. Even though he gave up, his wife never did and convinced him to self publish which he did in 2008. Things changed when the reviews his wife had been posting in different places began to pop off. Finally, after more than a decade since he started, a University of Chicago publisher contacted him with an offer to publish his work.

Sergio de la Pava’s magnum opus A Naked Singularity is a work that reinvented the American novel like never before. It has been variously called a post-modern exploration of the legal thriller by Grisham, a crime caper by Elmore Leonard, Quentin Tarantino, and a dash of Ocean’s Eleven, paired up with Voltairian sensibility. The lead in the novel is a public defender in New York named Casi, who is diligent with his work despite the heavy caseload he has since he has always been a compassionate man. The biggest obstacles to his work are Americans and the judicial system in the US, which does not care about his clients. De la Pava chronicles his work in court and outside it, even as he throws in his supportive and loving family, the rise and fall of Wilfred Benitez the boxer, his interactions with coworkers, and how he tries to steal from a drug ring with which one of his clients was involved. At the tail end of the novel, Casi does seem to be experiencing an altered state and undergoing some changes in his personal life and at work.

In Personae, Sergio de la Pava decided to pen an experimental work that is nothing like your usual story, as he combines philosophy, mystery, and metafiction. It starts with an enigmatic but brilliant investigator named Helen Tame who is working on the case of Antonio Arce, a reclusive writer who died under mysterious circumstances. Delving into his life and work, she soon finds a bunch of writings that all present a different philosophical concern style, and voice. It is not long before the work veers off from the investigative as it becomes more of an experimental work that explores themes of human consciousness, artistic creation, and identity. Sergio makes use of different formats from streams of consciousness passages, dramatic scripts, and essays, as he pens a very intellectual treatise. The work is arguably more about the nature of storytelling and questioning how we can understand another person rather than solving a mystery.

In 2018, Sergio de la Pava published Lost Empress, a hilariously shocking novel that deals with the criminal justice system and its most popular sport with equal vigor. Pava goes back to his storytelling roots, as he tells the story of the daughter of the aging Dallas Cowboys owner Nina Gill. She had been very much involved in the building of her father’s legacy and hence she is devastated when her father leaves the team to her brother. All she is given is the Indoor Football League franchise in Paterson Pork. But she is not one to commiserate and pout as she vows to make her small team into the kings of the NFL. In the meantime, a lethal and brilliant criminal mastermind named Nuno DeAngeles managed to get himself incarcerated at Rikers so that he could carry out the crime of the century. With razor-sharp prose, humor, and grace, de la Pava brings everything together as he explores everything from theoretical physics, the many species of love, and religion to emergency medicine, as he threads it all into an epic conclusion.