Vicente Herrasti was born in Mexico City in 1967. He is a novelist, essayist and translator. He has translated works by Edwin Muir and Herman Melville. His own novels include Taxidermia (Taxidermy), (1995), Diorama (1998) and his latest work, La muerte del filósofo (The Death of the Philosopher), excerpted here. Along with Jorge Volpi, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Eloy Urroz, and Ignacio Padilla, Herrasti is part of Mexico's "Grupo Crack," a literary movement that signaled its break with magical realism (especially the imitative magical realism that followed Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpieces) and whose members looked to take new risks in their own writing.