Новинки Сесара Айры

In Ghosts, a group of immigrant workers and their families are squatting on the haunted construction site of a luxury condominium building. One teenage girl's interest in the ghosts on the site becomes so intense that her mother realizes her life is in the balance. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter tells of a point in the life of German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, when he visits Latin America to paint its spectacular landscapes. And in The Literary Conference, a young translator called César Aira travels to a literary conference, intent on world domination . . .

A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, César Aira–the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long–The Musical Brain & Other Stories comprises twenty tales about oddballs, freaks, and loonies. Aira, with his fuga hacia adelante or "flight forward" into the unknown, gives us imponderables to ponder and bizarre and seemingly out-of-context plot lines, as well as thoughtful and passionate takes on everyday reality. The title story, first published in the New Yorker, is the creme de la creme of this exhilarating collection.

One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother visit a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors the daughter of what was her name? Miganne, who lived in front of Cabanillas s office Which Cabanillas? The one married to Artola s daughter? They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the Cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old wind-up toys, and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about the dead rising from their graves, leaving the cemetery, and sucking the blood of the living all the figures are disturbingly reminiscent of the dinner party. And how can the citizens save their town when deep down there is always such a dark thirst for life?"

Three Novels by Cesar Aira

Three Novels by Cesar Aira

Durante la Edad Media, en una población de la costa catalana, vive un anciano monje que ha consagrado los últimos cuarenta años de su vida al ejercicio escrupuloso de su vocación, percibiendo el mundo siempre desde la oración y la distancia. Tras obrar unos cuantos milagros, nuestro monje se gana el reconocimiento y la devoción de todos los feligreses del mundo cristiano. Pero al intuir que se acerca el final de su vida, decide retirarse y terminar sus días en su Italia natal. El abad y las autoridades, ante el miedo a perder la principal fuente de ingresos de la región, encargan su asesinato para conservar el cuerpo como sagrada reliquia. El azar o la Providencia conceden al viejo la oportunidad de escapar de este funesto destino, y se embarca hacia parajes exóticos en una odisea llena de peligros y aventuras. Así da comienzo el zigzagueante viaje de nuestro héroe hacia el corazón de África.

At last, a noir novel from the Argentine master of suspense and surprises
Maxi, a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires’s shantytown, attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone — including two innocent teenage girls — to break a drug ring that he believes is operating within the slum. A strange new drug, a brightly lit carousel of a slum, the kindness of strangers, gunplay... no matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira’s “fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics” (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira’s mesmerizing work, is filled with wonder and mad invention.

Cesar es un escritor que se gana la vida haciendo tra-ducciones у que Ueva una vida secreta de cientifico loco. Poco despues de ganar una fortuna resolvien-do el enigma centenario que encerraba el extrano monumento conocido como el Hilo de Macuto, es invitado a un congreso de literatura en la pequena ciudad de Merida. Camuflado bajo el aspecto de un inofensivo escritor, en realidad se propone llevar a cabo un plan maestro: clonar a Carlos Fuentes у crear un ejercito de intelectuales poderosos para asi domi-nar el mundo. Algo que no le sale exactamente como esperaba.
Biodispositivos de clonacion portables, antiguos amores у colosales gusanos azules... en poquisimas paginas, Cesar Aira construye una delirante у diverti-disima historia.

The Seamstress and the Wind is a deliciously laugh-out-loud-funny novel. A seamstress who is sewing a wedding dress for the pregnant local art teacher fears that her son, while playing in a big semitruck, has been accidentally kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia.
Completely unhinged, she calls a local taxi to follow the semi in hot pursuit. When her husband finds out what’s happened, he takes off after wife and child. They race not only to the end of the world, but to adventures in desire — where the wild Southern wind falls in love with the seamstress, and a monster child takes up with the truck driver. Interspersed are Aira’s musings about memory and childhood, and his hometown of Coronel Pringles, with a compelling view of the hard lot of this working-class town, situated not far from Buenos Aires.

Über den Dächern von Buenos Aires feiert Patri mit ihren Eltern Silvester. Freunde kommen hinzu, die den Ort - den Rohbau eines Hochhauses - charmant finden. Niemand stört sich an den ungewöhnlichen Gästen: drei Geister, nackte Männer, sichtbar gemacht durch den Baustaub. Patri ist fasziniert von ihnen. Verkörpern sie doch das Andere, das Neue. Die Warnungen ihrer Mutter schlägt sie in den Wind. Soll sie sich mit ihnen in die Dunkelheit der Nacht stürzen?

“On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course.”—from Ghosts Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her…

A sinisterly funny modern-day Through the Looking Glass that begins with cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream.
"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention.

A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.

Un libro especial dentro de la prolífica obra del autor de Ema la cautiva. Un comentario banal mueve al autor, cumplidos los cincuenta años, a reflexionar sobre sus supuestas certezas y sobre la incertidumbre que está por venir. Una obra breve y exacta que habla sobre la relación entre vida y escritura.

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En una remota provincia china, un campesino sutil se extravía en un hechizo de amor. Como casi todos los amores, éste es imposible.Pero Lu Hsin, ingenioso y paciente, decide crear una posibilidad a partir de la nada. La tarea le lleva casi toda la vida. Esta fábula erótica, intemporal y eterna aunque ineludiblemente china, sucede sobre el fondo agitado de veinte años cruciales en la historia del Imperio de la Porcelana: los que median entre la Larga Marcha y la Revolución Cultural. La hidráulica, la pintura, la política, la vida cotidiana en una pequeña aldea, y una colorida galería de personajes (entre los que sobresale la augusta obra de Kant montada en un dragón), marcan el paso del tiempo de la ficción, que se revela en el desenlace como el fulminante momento de la realidad y el amor dragón), marcan el paso del tiempo de la ficción, que se revela en el desenlace como el fulminante momento de la realidad y el amor.

Es el último día del año en un edificio en construcción en Buenos Aires. En la mañana los futuros propietarios visitan el lugar, acompañados por el arquitecto y los decoradores mientras los albañiles trabajan. Alrededor de todos ellos flotan desnudos los fantasmas. El genio narrativo de César Aira nos lleva a otra historia y sólo al terminar de leer Los fantasmas caerá todo en su sitio y se acrecentarán los significados retrospectivamente, de la manera única y propia de este escritor fascinante.