Three novellas by one of the most idiosyncratic and unusual international writers today, packaged as an Essential for the first time.
Cesar Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. One of the most prolific writers in Argentina, Aira has published more than seventy books.
Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists
working in Spanish today and should not be missed
*The New York Times*
Aira has written over seventy books. They are mostly novels, mostly
slim, and mostly astoundingly good. He reminds me of Philip K.
Dick, of Honore de Balzac, of Machado de Assis, and of Soren
Kierkegaard... all of which is simply to say that he is without
compare
*The New Yorker*
Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G.
Sebald
*Los Angeles Times*
The author who nowadays is perhaps the most original shocking, the
most exciting and subversive Spanish narrative writer: Cesar
Aira
*Ignacio Echeverri*
He is an improviser, his work a performance on the page. But
experimental, improvisational, performative and dream-like as
Aira's many marvellous books are, they also reveal him to be no
less of a traditionalist, responding to the most ancient custom of
storytelling as a way of passing the hours of the night
*Judges’ citation, The Man Booker International Prize 2015*
Cesar Aira is writing a gigantic, headlong, acrobatic fresco of
modern life entirely made up of novelettes, novellas, novellitos...
In other words, he is a great literary trickster, and also one of
the most charming
*Adam Thirlwell*
Aira's stories seem like shards from an ever expanding
interconnecting universe. He populates the racing void with
multitudinous visions, like Indian paintings of gods vomiting gods.
He executes digression with muscular lucidity
*The New York Times*
César Aira's body of work is a perfect machine for invention-he
writes without necessity or any apparent forebears, always as if
for the first time
*BOMB Magazine*
If there's currently a writer who defies all classification that
writer is César Aira. Once you've read Aira, you don't want to
stop. Aira is an eccentric, but he's also one of the three or four
best Spanish-language writers alive today
*Roberto Bolaño*
Aira's works are like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely
juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful
*Harper's*
Aira's novels display a consistent engagement with the importance
of storytelling and the act of writing. The engrossing power of his
work comes from how he carries out these feats: with the
inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after
imaginary enemies in the park
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
To love the novels of Cesar Aira you must have a taste for the
absurd, a tolerance for the obscurely philosophical and a
willingness to laugh out loud against your better judgment
*NPR Books*
Aira's charm is subtle, unobtrusive, it doesn't try to seduce with
cheap likeability. He takes a leisurely stroll through his scenes.
It's as if Machado de Assis got redrafted by Bolaño and edited by
Anatole France
*Bookslut*
César Aira's novels are the narrative equivalent of the Exquisite
Corpse, that Surrealist parlor game in which players add to
drawings or stories without knowledge of previous or subsequent
additions. Wildly heterogeneous elements are thrown together, and
the final result never fails to surprise and amuse
*The Millions*
In spite of the apparent randomness of his ideas and the pacing of
his breaks, surprises, and cuts in time, he inspires a sort of
willingness in the reader to be taken aback; any reader-untrusting
or submissive-might enjoy them as if they had pressed "shuffle" on
their favorite pop band's discography
*Ox and Pigeon*
What's really unique about Aira's output, considering the speed
with which he 'flies forward' (seemingly by the seat of his pants),
isn't that he produces so much work, or that it's fanciful and odd,
but that what he's produced forms a coherent body of work - and one
that's consistently enjoyable to read
*The Argentina Independent*
A manifestly gifted writer
*The Quarterly Conversation*
Astonishing-turns Don Quixote into Picasso
*Harper's*
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