Inked in Gray Press has acquired world English rights to Querida: by author Roberto Cofresí Hopgood. Sold to Dakota Rayne at Inked in Gray Press, in a nice deal by AJ Van Belle at the Booker Albert Literary Agency.
Querida: is an adult genre-bending literary novel that speaks to how we use language to make meaning and about the intersections of class and power in society.
Maria Collins, a 60-year-old Mexican-American queer punk firecracker, is on a mission to destroy the family book, Querida:, that has become the centerpiece of her 100-year-old megalomaniac father’s global religious empire. The book, rumored to rewrite itself every time it’s opened, is highly addictive. By getting rid of it, she’ll bring her father’s dominion crashing down—or at least hurt him back for wreaking havoc on the world.
Maria sets events in motion that may unexpectedly lead her to Fritz, her long-ago girlfriend and one true love who vanished 40 years ago. However, to find Fritz, Maria may have to join her father on a quest that will take her across Mexico, into war-torn and recently independent Texas, and possibly all the way to the Caribbean. Through the twisty journey, she will have to come to terms with her hatred of her father, her love for Fritz, and this supposedly magical book her great-grandmother wrote.
Querida: is expected to release Fall 2027.
In the meantime, we’ve talked with Roberto about his upcoming release to give readers a behind-the-scenes peek of Querida:!
What inspired you to write Querida:? Did any special or unusual circumstances or incidents play a role in the conception and/or writing of this book?
The first scene of the book that I wrote was a scene where two friends pick up an unconscious stranger from a car wreck on the side of the road in Texas.
That scene was inspired by a vision I had on a long road trip from Houston to New Mexico. A friend and I drove through the night, 12 hours on Interstate 10. A long boring ride on a straight road all the way to the horizon with little to nothing to distract us along the way, except a few cassettes and conversation. My friend, who was driving, was a Texas preacher’s son, and in between listening to Prince and U2, he jokingly put on cassettes of his father’s sermons as we drove. It was all very surreal. At some point, between dozing off and trying to stay awake in the passenger seat, watching the same interminable landscape fly by, I had a vision.
In that vision, we crashed the car and someone pulled over and pulled my dying body from the wreck, threw me in the back of their pickup truck and drove off into the unknown.
What did the vision mean? Who were the people who picked me up? What led to the crash? What happened after they picked me up?
The answers, for now, became the scene of Maria and Fritz picking up a stranger from a wreck. Everything else grew from there in mysterious and magical ways, almost like the book in the novel, changing a little every time I opened it, taking shape, as I tried to capture the bits and pieces I could to make meaning from them.
Without any spoilers, what was your favorite part of the book to write?
I loved writing most parts of this novel. It was fun. It was more of a discovery than a planned-out project. Its development was organic. The characters quickly took on lives of their own. The story unfolded as I wrote it, and I found myself cheering often at the audacity of these characters or when I discovered something about their past that they’d been hiding from me. It was a lot of fun.
However, there are two parts that come to mind which felt like being on some amazing adventure as they took shape, even with the considerable difficulties the characters faced. The two parts involve two separate characters as they run away with the magical book and discover what the book can do and how it affects them. One character runs to the US Northwest to fight along with Earth First! environmentalists and ends up living for months atop an old growth tree as he gets to know the book. The other sequence follows a character as they travel all around the Caribbean basin from Mexico to Costa Rica to Venezuela and then up the Lesser Antilles carrying the book and trying to decide what to do with it.
Were there any major influences for you as a writer?
Too many to list, but I’d like to mention the historical and world-spanning scope of Emilio Salgari’s adventure novels, the sci-fi philosophical humor of Stanislaw Lem’s short stories, the intricate storytelling and character building (over a span of more than 40 years!) of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez’ Love and Rockets never-ending graphic novel, and the beautiful and hopeful imaginings of a post-humanist, post- civilization world of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy.
Without any spoilers, is there a character who holds a special place in your heart?
Of course, all the characters in the novel hold a special place in my heart. Almost any quality in any of the characters can be traced back to qualities in myself or in people I’ve loved, in people who have inspired me or who have disappointed me. The characters are like children that grow up imitating the qualities they see in the adults around them, until they grow up and become their own people. But we still see those adults reflected in them. If you know what to look for.
However, of all the characters, Fritz holds a special place. Her struggles in life, her personality, her hopes, her efforts, even if misguided at times, at trying to do good, are all very close to my heart and people I’ve cared for in my life. She is the offspring of some very special people.
If your book had a soundtrack or theme song, what would it be?
Oh, this is so tough. Especially because the novel is narrated through multiple POVs and each of them would probably have their own soundtrack. For example, the antagonist, Goss Collins, loves Mozart’s Don Giovanni, though for all the wrong reasons. Fritz, herself, probably has some Grateful Dead psychedelic jam going on in her head most of the time, and Maria Collins, our MC, would probably listen to a fair amount of late 80s-early 90s aggressive post-punk and hip hop like the Butthole Surfers and NWA.
Overall, I think something like Blonde Redhead’s For the Damaged Coda or M83’s Outro would work well throughout, but both of those have already been used so much in soundtracks (for good reason) that I would probably have to find something else.
What is your favorite trope?
I’m not that great with favorites, but related to this novel, Querida: I’m fascinated by the impossible magical objects trope, their use as a MacGuffin, and the investigation into their positive and negative effects on individuals and on mankind as a whole. The mysterious book in Querida: is inextricably linked and influenced by Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph and Library of Babel, by Thomas Pynchon’s schwarzgerät (Gravity’s Rainbow), and Foster Wallace’s samizdat (Infinite Jest), and even by J.R.R. Tolkien’s one ring (Lord of the Rings) and M.C. Escher’s art.
What was a memorable moment when you learned that language had power?
I have a friend who sometimes quotes back to me something I said maybe ten or more years before. These are things I casually said in conversation, a little phrase, an off-handed comment, a joke. Something that I don’t even remember saying, and yet here it is being said back to me years later because it was meaningful to her. I believe her because I trust her and because in the end, they sound like things I probably said. They sound like me. The things I actually remember saying, though, the things that I said and thought, hey that was clever, those things she doesn’t remember.
There’s a certain magic to this process of language, how the words bounce back and forth between us, creating, adjusting, changing, growing meaning and then losing meaning again until one day they vanish.
So what are you reading now? What’s on your TBR List?
I just finished Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy, and it was a monumental life-changing experience. Books like that do something magical with writing that I could’ve never imagined was possible. When I read something that amazing, the books that follow tend to suffer by comparison. So, I’ve been reading assorted short stories by Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters), Mariana Enriquez (Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego) and Adrián Román (Pinche Paleta Payaso) which are great as a palate cleanser of sorts. Next, I have a couple of novels, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I’d be surprised if I didn’t like, cause I love both authors. That should all work towards getting me to the point where I can try other unknown propositions without the shadow of Ferrante clouding the experience. Oh, and I’ve also started, very slowly, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.
What other works have you published? Where can we find you?
I’ve published two books, El sueño de la muerte (Gnomo, 2025) and Bellows: Fables from the Musical Underground (Hmm, 2014). Both are “novels in stories” or interlaced short stories. I’ve also published short stories and creative non-fiction in many magazines and anthologies.
My website has links to all my published books, short stories, and creative non-fiction.
These days you can find me mostly adventuring around North Carolina, though I still try to visit Puerto Rico and Texas as often as I can.
If you are in any of these places, you might find me in bookstores, dives, or just on some sidewalk talking to strangers.
In social media you can find me on Threads, Instagram, BlueSky, and Storygraph.
About Roberto Cofresí Hopgood
Roberto Cofresí Hopgood (he/el) is a Puerto Rican (Boricua/Caribeño/Latine) writer.
Among other life affirming adventures, he survived being adrift on the Gulf of California, being lost without water in Barrancas del Cobre, being robbed by a one-eyed man with a pen knife in NYC and being yelled at by Werner Herzog in Texas. He is the author of El sueño de la muerte (Gnomo, 2025) and Bellows: Fables from the Musical Underground (Hmm, 2014). His stories (in English and español) have appeared in Uncharted, LatineLit, Smokelong Quarterly, The Write Launch, Enclave, Evento Horizonte, Drunk Monkeys, Claridad, and more, as well as in multiple anthologies.
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