Cesar Aira. New Directions, $14.95 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2090-3
Simultaneously an homage and deconstruction of the Victorian adventure story, Aira (Varamo) delivers an ingenious and acrobatic novel set on the Argentinean pampas. Clarke, an English naturalist, undertakes an expedition to document the legendary...
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C%C3%A9sar Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Rosalie Knecht. New Directions, $12.95 trade paper (144p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1912-9
This surrealist, self-indulgent exercise set between Patagonia and the Argentinian city of Coronel Pringles kicks off with an inspired invocation comparing the characteristics of memory and dreams, with Aira (Ghosts) casting his lot with the latter.
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C%C3%A9sar Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, $12.95 trade paper (92p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1741-5
Aira, author of more than 80 published books, returns with another slim story, this one about an ineffectual government clerk who, after wandering around 1923 Colón, Panama all night, sits down and in one fell swoop writes the most famous poem in...
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Cesar Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, $13.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1911-2
This disappointing potboiler by the acclaimed author of The Hare and Varamo introduces Maxi, a muscular and dimwitted young man who spends his nights in a Buenos Aires shantytown helping trash pickers carry away their finds. Pitted against him is...
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Cesar Aira, Author, Chris Andrews, Translator , trans. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions $13.95 (117p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1631-9
A six-year-old child sickened by eating cyanide-contaminated ice cream makes for agonies and picaresque adventures from Argentine author Aira (Adventures in the Life of a Landscape Painter
), who draws on a wave of real food-supply poisonings in...
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Cesar Aira, Author, Chris Andrews, Translator , trans. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions $14.95 (139p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1742-2
Aira, an unusual Argentinean author (How I Became a Nun)
, writes a compelling novel about a migrant Chilean family living in an apartment house under construction in Buenos Aires. New Year's Eve finds the hard-drinking Chilean night watchman,...
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Cesar Aira, Author, Chris Andrews, Translator, Roberto Bolano, Preface by New Directions Publishing Corporation $12.95 (87p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1630-2
Part travelogue, part meditation on art, this brief, increasingly riveting fictionalized history by Argentinean author Aira (How I Became a Nun) reinvents German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas's ill-fated 1837 South American journey. Rugendas, a...
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César Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. New Directions, $13.95 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2110-8
The indefatigable Aira’s (The Hare) latest is an excellent place to encounter his logic-defying brilliance for the first time, and will likewise please existing fans. Our narrator starts by recalling his practice of revisiting the day’s...
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Cesar Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, $24.95 (360p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2029-3
Aira’s output has been a steady trickle of irrefutable genius and deepening strangeness, from the haunted architecture of Ghosts to delirious westerns set in the pampas of South America, such as The Hare. Now we have the first collection of Aira’s...
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Cesar Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, $13.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1910-5
Chris Andrews’s adept translation of this early Aira (The Musical Brain) novel exhibits the cunning brilliance of one of Latin America’s most critically acclaimed authors. In 19th-century Argentina, Ema is transported to a frontier fort as a...
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César Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, $13.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1908-2
Aira (Dinner) reveals little of substance in this haphazard “true account” of his upbringing in Pringles, Argentina. “I was born in 1949, at the climax of the Perónist regime,” Aira writes; he describes how the iconic (and infamous) presidency of...
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César Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Nick Caistor. New Directions, $14.95 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2112-2
Aira (Ema the Captive) challenges readers in two deeply strange novellas. In the first, a monk in Korea longs to visit the West. He conspires to turn a chance encounter with a French married couple, a photographer and a cartoonist, into an...
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César Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, $13.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1909-9
In this profound memoir, Aira (The Linden Tree) turns 50 and sees this benchmark as an opportunity to make changes in his life. A casual conversation with his wife leads him to a darker contemplation of youth wasted, a diminishment of artistic...
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César Aira, trans. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. New Directions, $12.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2926-5
Aira’s clever, whimsical collection of autofiction (after The Musical Brain) draws on the author’s obsessive 30-year-long pursuit of collecting the international art magazine Artforum. Initially able to obtain issues in Argentina only by chance,...
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