Authors >> Alejandro Rebolledo

Alejandro Rebolledo

Alejandro Rebolledo was a journalist, writer, and DJ. His literary, journalistic, and artistic work makes him a key figure in Venezuelan cultural life.

The son of sociologist Leonor Pulgar and filmmaker Carlos Rebolledo, Alejandro studied high school at the Santiago de Leon and Los Alamos schools and journalism at the Central University of Venezuela. Before his death, he was working on his doctoral thesis in Social Psychology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

After finishing his degree in Journalism, he started working for El Nacional daily newspaper. As a star editor of the Sunday magazine Feriado, he became one of the first writers experimenting with 'new journalism' in Venezuela. He also worked as a DJ at Bar Moloko, of which he was also a partner, and as a producer of electronic music events. 

Alejandro was a founding member of the extra-plastic artistic collective Escuadrón Sudaca. The collective participated in the Pirelli and Dior salons and the Caracas International Art Fair.

In 1996 he led the editorial redesign of the weekly Urbe, which became a reference for alternative journalism at the time. In 1997 he co-founded and became the director of Radar magazine. He also co-anchored the radio show 'El Último Round' on Caracas' FM 92.9. In 1998 he co-created the internet portal Loquesea.com. In the following years he co-founded the portal in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. 

That same year he published the novel Pin Pan Pun, which became a finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. He won the reader's Urbe Award for the novel of the year. 

In 2003 he started writing in the evening newspaper El Mundo. That year he performed as a DJ in the mythical The Flower and the Bar Elektro.

He moved to Barcelona in 2005 to start a doctorate in Social Psychology and continue his literary work. The book of poems Romances del Destroy and the unpublished fragments make up El Conde de Rovellones date from this period. In the 2010s, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the anthropological phenomenon of Starbucks, which remains incomplete.

In 2016 he decided to resume his job as a chronicler by writing a book on Venezuela. The book was to be the first title of publishing house Codex. A few weeks later, he died unexpectedly in Barcelona.

Authors >> Carlos Lizarralde

Carlos Lizarralde

Carlos Lizarralde writes about the long-term structures of Latin American history to question our conventional wisdom about the present.

He pursued a doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and studied politics and literary theory at Hampshire College.

He divides his time between Mexico City and Miami Beach.

Lizarralde's book, Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, will be published March 19, 2024.

Authors >> Rafael Osío Cabrices

Rafael Osío Cabrices

Deploying the tools of journalism and fiction, Rafael Osío Cabrices writes about the ways in which the currents of change impact people’s lives. His fiction has been published in Carátula, Casapaís, and several short-story anthologies. He has published the nonfiction books Salitre en el corazón, El horizonte encendido, La vida sigue and Apuntes bajo el aguacero, among others.

Like an underground current, running beneath all that body of work is the same obsession: Venezuela.

Osío Cabrices graduated in Journalism at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, in Caracas. He has worked as a reporter, contributor, and editor at El Nacional and several other outlets in Venezuela and other countries. He is an editor, communications consultant, and editor-in-chief at Caracas Chronicles. He lives in Montreal.

Osío Cabrices' book, Centauro: la novela de Páez will be published in 2025.

Codex>>Fiction 

Codex >> New Titles  >> Pin Pan Pun by Alejandro Rebolledo

Pin Pan Pun

Alejandro Rebolledo

1998, a year away from the millennium, and Caracas is already living with the premonition of the disaster to come. Pin Pan Pun is the harsh, cynical, and exuberant chronicle of a society on the verge of collapse.

"Julian, Cayman, Chicharra, and Luis. Among the Palos Grandes gang there are only two of us left. Cayman in a wheelchair and me. Chicharra got killed in 1987. Like a lunatic he drove a BMW to Sarría to score blow. He never got out. Julián said goodbye in 92. He shot himself because of Claudia..."

Finalist of the Rómulo Gallegos Award in 1999, Pin Pan Pun became an immediate best-seller in late 20th century Caracas. That same year the public awarded it the Urbe Prize for the best novel of the year.

Twenty years after its publication, the novel seems to have been written yesterday. A classic of Venezuelan literature. The novel of the pre-millennium.

By 1998 Pin Pan Pun closes an era and imagines an impossible 21st century.

For this special edition commemorating the 20th anniversary of its publication, Joaquin Urbina, designer of the first edition, makes a graphic upgrade to connect the pop sensibility of 1998 with the 2020s.

* * *

"The Venezuelan novel of my generation."  Edgar Ramirez, two-time Golden Globe nominee and winner of a César du cinéma.

"Caracas changed after reading Pin Pan Pun! Alejandro had the gift of capturing a moment and making it immortal!” Boris Izaguirre, first runner-up for the 2007 Planeta Prize.

“Trainspotting my ass” José Luis Pardo, Grammy nominee and Latin Grammy winner.

"Quadrophenia caraqueño without scooters" Joselo, Cafe Tacuba, winner of five Latin Grammys and a Grammy.

"A return forward for Venezuelan literature." El Nacional (original note).

Codex >> New Titles  >> Venezuela's Collapse by Carlos Lizarralde

Venezuela's Collapse:

The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart

Carlos Lizarralde

How did Latin America's exceptional democracy become a nearly failed state? Why would a leader firmly in control plunge one of the planet's richest countries into a humanitarian crisis?

Conventional wisdom blames the wicked madness of a populist who squandered an oil fortune. Venezuela's Collapse offers an alternative account that places race, ethnicity, and the conflict over resources and power at the center of the Hugo Chavez story.

Venezuela's Collapse chronicles 500 years of demographic, cultural, and economic strands that came together in 1998 as the country elected a dashing new President. He promised his country the moon only to usher in an unimaginable catastrophe. Tracing the dismantling of the liberal state, the ransacking of public and private enterprises, and the emergence of a feudal world of violence, hunger, and disease, Venezuela's Collapse offers a compelling argument about the historical nature of the Chavista years until 2019.

Venezuela's uncertain future will be determined by the long and conflicted past that fueled the Bolivarian Revolution. Collapse offers a road map to decode the years ahead.

Venezuela's Collapse will be published March 19, 2024.

Codex >> New Titles  >> Centauro

Centauro

La novela de Páez

Rafael Osío Cabrices

Centauro will be released in late 2025

A native son of the Plains, he rode beyond his horizons to bring home new ideas, endure the winter of exile, and flourish in a new world. He knew horses and people alike and believed nature wasn’t a foe but an ally. He was Achilles and Odysseus, and Florentino, the singer who defeated the devil at a crossroads in the plains. He knew how to kill and to forgive. He fought for glory on the battlefield and peace on his land—a life of power, love, glory, and treason.

Leaping over official history, Centauro hunts down the known pieces of the puzzle and imagines the missing ones to assemble the extraordinary life of Venezuela’s first national leader, José Antonio Páez.

Centauro chronicles the birth pains of the republic, from the crisis of the Crown's rule to the dawn of modernity, through two devastating wars, the failure of a utopia, and the traumatic surge of a unique society.

A journey across the Venezuela that was –in more ways than we think– and the one that still is. The novel of Páez is the story of the country.

Codex >> About

About

Codex Novellus is a collective of writers and editors contributing to the next chapter of Venezuelan publishing.

A two-hundred-year-old nation existing within certain borders, Venezuela was interrupted by a social convulsion that has seen one out of every four people flee to other countries. Many of those eight million are still in dangerous transit.

Along with the crisis of refugees and those displaced, a broader collapse of civil society ended a golden era of Venezuelan culture. Many publishers, galleries, universities, foundations, newspapers, and production companies became ghosts of their former selves or closed down. Several generations of intellectuals and artists are scattered around the world. Most titles from the cultural canon have been unavailable for years.

Codex publishes original work taking the Venezuelan cultural tradition through new, uncharted territory: written around the world in different languages. We also bring back texts that can help bridge the country's cultural tradition onto a new era. Beyond Venezuela's current impasse, we are after new codexes reinventing the medieval book to expand accessibility, availability, and the preservation of texts.

We began this project by publishing the then out-of-print Pin Pan Pun, a cult classic and finalist of the 1999 International Novel Rómulo Gallegos Award.

Please write us hola at codexnovellus dot com and distribution at codexnovellus dot come.