Black Belt is an outrageously funny parody about the world of big business and the social climb. A sketch of how some corporations promote sect structures in which access to the top of the chain of command is synonymous with ascent to heaven. The black belt —or black belt as they say in Spain— is the highest professional recognition to which one can aspire at Soluciones, a modern company like any other, dedicated to solving custom solutions. Quite a dedication — a service on the rise — in this age of limitless inventiveness. The characters that come to life in Cinta negra—molded with the sand of a world of ruthless professional and emotional competition, full of affective deprivations—and the situations in which they develop their abilities—Soluciones work methods, the training workshop of poor through art, etc.—weave a lucid, agile and ironic story that carefully dissects the business world and everyday life.

Yes, with his first novel —La suma de los ceros, edited by this same publishing house (and by surplus); and already translated into French, English and German— Eduardo Rabasa made clear his great skills as a writer, Cinta negra is proof that we are facing a new and powerful voice in which although the classics (Orwell, Swift...) resonate with his vision of the world is unique.

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Of his first novel, The Sum of Zeros, it has been said:

“During demanding times, some writers offer us a good story: they amuse us with entertainment. A few others insist that there may be something important to say, and that it may be worth trying to say. His art is fiction, but its dimensions are expansive. Genet, Orwell, Dostoevsky. His wit inserts itself into our muscles, its resonances remain with us. Rabasa is a writer of the second type. The sum of the zeros could be a stinging cri de coeur coming from our own street. It is a Mexican novel of rage and inspiration, of heroes and villains, of quiet despair and shocking glimpses. And it all takes place in a neighborhood that looks a lot like everyone else's.”—Forrest Gander.

"Comparisons with 1984 are inevitable (...) However, The Sum of the Zeroes is closer to Brave New World than to the Orwellian dystopia."—Victor Parkas, El País.

«Meticulous, written in harsh language, [The Sum of the Zeroes] is the portrait of a suffocating microcosm, where hierarchies are fixed by the illusion of a social progress that will never come. Rabasa accurately dissects the mechanisms of a false democracy, where there is no possible political alternation (...) A mirror of some Latin American countries, this dense novel offers a pertinent reflection on the ways in which a regime can exercise violence today : less for plain repression than for the ability to impose a deadly lethargy on people.”—Ariane Singer, Le Monde.

«Villa Miserias is, of course, a microcosm, but Rabasa's novel is not the usual story that portrays society in miniature. It is an emphatically political novel, willing to use theory, and not only practice (...) It is an impressive work, particularly for its creative approach to the concept of "political fiction", and for the suggestions about what fiction can still do ».—Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review.

"With hints of both Orwell and Ballard, this delirious and detailed dystopia exposes the demagogy and inequality, individualism and false democracy implicit in our current way of life. The Sum of Zeros is not only a magnificent novel, it is also a necessary novel.”—Gary Perry, Foyles Bookseller, London.

How can a satirical farce be so acidly realistic? How can a precise and theoretical dissection of neoliberal democracy have such courage and such viscerally real characters? How did Eduardo Rabasa manage to turn the personal account of an individual's breakdown into an anatomical sketch of the political quagmire in which we find ourselves trapped? And how did he make it so funny? Don't answer these questions: just read the book.”—Aaron Bady, The New Inquiry.

«Eduardo Rabasa's first novel is much more than an intelligent social criticism; it contains some of the most literary, best-written pages I have read in a long time.”—Rebeca García Nieto, Crítico estado.