An astounding novel from Argentina that is a meditation on the beautiful and the grotesque in nature, the art of landscape painting, and one experience in a man's life that became a lightning rod for inspiration. 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

Este libro recoge la transcripción de unas clases que di en el Centro Rojas en el invierno de 1988. El público fue una veintena de estudiantes muy jóvenes: a nuestro alrededor, los cuatro pisos del Rojas hervían de performances, videos, cine, música, pintura, capoeira, teatro, títeres, talleres, seminarios, cursos… Todo lo que se manifestaba parecía contiguo a su propia invención: igual que en la obra de Copi. Esa inmediatez dio el tono de nuestras reuniones. El curso se llamaba "Cómo leer a Copi". Me pareció que la respuesta más plausible era postular una especie de continuo con el que podríamos "seguir" leyendo, a Copi o a quien sea, indefinidamente, creando un mundo que siempre pasará a otro mundo que lo incluya, y éste a otro más… Con la hipótesis complementaria de que todo pasaje es una transformación, ya estábamos listos para contarnos el cuento maravilloso de Copi. César Aira Osvaldo Aguirre Aira revive a Copi La publicación de COPI importa, por varios motivos, una novedad. Se trata del primer libro de ensayos de César Aira hasta ahora conocido por sus cuentos y novelas. Se trata también, del primer título de Beatriz Viterbo Editora, sello que tiene su sede en Rosario. La colección que inaugura ese libro se llama `EL ESCRIBIENTE` y está reservada a la edición de ensayos. El proyecto no parece reducirse a dar curso al `nuevo libro` de Aira, sino que apunta a situar como objeto de lectura – es decir, de reflexión y de debate- al ensayo género, de características difusas que no suele merecer demasiada atención a la hora de definir políticas editoriales (aunque la intuición sobre lo que es bueno reporte, a veces, más dinero que el olfateo de lo que es vendible). COPI, Raúl Damonte, nació en Buenos Aires en 1939 y murió en París en 1987. Aparte de ser dibujante de cómics, escribió once obras teatrales – algunas interpretadas por él mismo-, cinco novelas y una serie de narraciones cortas. El ensayo de Aira es una transcripción de cuatro conferencias dictadas durante el invierno de 1988. `Dado que la obra de COPI es poco conocida en la Argentina – nos explica el autor-, opté por presentarla, en sucesión más o menos cronológica, contando y describiendo sus novelas y piezas teatrales, algunas con todo detalle`. Este procedimiento está ligado a la postulación de un `continuo`, formas de lectura que Aira extiende, virtualmente, a cualquier texto: se trata de leer llevando `adelante` la lectura, de buscar el significado en lo que sigue y no en lo ya leído, en lo que hace continuo y no en lo que se corta de recorrer la horizontal del funcionamiento y no la vertical del sentido. Ahora bien: la `transcripción` ha respetado el tono y la sintaxis del discurso oral. De ahí las anécdotas y las digresiones, las marchas y las contramarchas, las citas aproximadas y las improvisaciones? para nada accesorias, porque en esos lugares Aira se ocupa de cuestiones de poética (de las relaciones de sucesión en el relato, de las diferencias entre cuento y novela, etc.) y recupera, discute y, finalmente, acepta o rechaza materiales de la tradición (de Borges sobre todo). Paralelamente a la vida y a la obra de COPI se muestran así las maneras del narrador oral, que sabe atraer la atención del oyente y que sabe transmitir, con su historia, el arte de relatar. La forma del cuento breve, según la corriente derivada de Poe, sería la de un hilo cuya tensión excluye adornos o digresiones, la del ensayo (de Aira), la de una madeja que se ovilla y se desovilla en forma ininterrumpida. Tomado de `El cronista cultural, Julio de 1991

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 questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter's life hangs in the balance

"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

En la novela corta ` La costurera y el viento` César Aira hace uso de lo que más sabe. Su facilidad para imaginar y a través de la imaginación confrontar al olvido, para que junto a la memoria como apoyo, ir cosechando los recuerdos de a uno, que sin su ayuda sólo serían desechos en la playa después de la marea. César Aira(a los nueve años) juega con su amigo Omar en la caja del acoplado de un camión gigante, curiosamente llamado ` el chiquito`. En esa tarde de verano, en su pueblo natal, Coronel Pringles, Omar y Aira, juegan a asustarse dentro del acoplado. Un lugar extraño para jugar a eso, aunque la imaginación de los chicos no encuentre límites. Imprevistamente el amigo, Omar, desaparece y a partir de allí, comienza una carrera maratónica, en que la madre del chico, ` Delia Ziffoni, la costurera del pueblo`, deja su lugar de ama de casa intrascendente, para convertirse en la heroína del pueblo, saliendo en busca del hijo desaparecido. Aira no lo dice, pero una mujer común ante la desaparición de su hijo, y ante la incertidumbre de no saber como está y si está con vida o en buen estado de salud, saca fuerzas de donde no sabe que tiene, para hacer la violencia y salir en su busca. Puede que uno no pueda evitar asociar la historia de esta mujer común, Delia Ziffoni, con las madres de plaza de Mayo, quienes debieron salir en busca de sus hijos desaparecidos, y aqui otra vez fueron las mujeres y no los hombres, quienes juntaron coraje para rebelarse contra lo que sea, cuando se puso en juego la vida del hijo

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

Clarke, a nineteenth-century English naturalist, roams the pampas in search of that most elusive and rare animal: the Legibrerian hare, whose defining quality seems to be its ability to fly. The local Indians, pointing skyward, report recent sightings of the hare but then ask Clarke to help them search for their missing chief as well. On further investigation Clarke finds more than meets the eye: in the Mapuche and Voroga languages every word has at least two meanings. Witty, very ironic, and with all the usual Airian digressive magic, The Hare offers subtle reflections on love, Victorian-era colonialism, and the many ambiguities of language

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

"César Aira has become a cult fiction writer in his native Argentina as well as throughout Latin America for his hyperrealist treatment of surreal or implausible scenarios and his aggressive defiance of literary conventions," writes Mónica de la Torre, Senior Editor BOMB Magazine, in her introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading. With their translation of "The Spy," BOMB became one of the first to bring César Aira to English speaking readers. Here, Aira takes a metaphysical look at life, art, and politics, confirming that "in art there is one condition that takes precedent over all others: to do things well."

Unmistakably the work of César Aira, Varamo is about the day in the life of a hapless government employee who, after wandering around all night after being paid by the Ministry in counterfeit money, eventually writes the most celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Boy. What is odd is that, at fifty years old, Varamo “hadn’t previously written one sole verse, nor had it ever occurred to him to write one.” Among other things, this novella is an ironic allegory of the poet's vocation and inspiration, the subtlety of artistic genius, and our need to give literature an historic, national, psychological, and aesthetic context. But Aira goes further still — converting the ironic allegory into a formidable parody of the expectations that all narrative texts generate — by laying out the pathos of a man who between one night and the following morning is touched by genius. Once again Aira surprises us with his unclassifiable fiction: original and enjoyable, worthy of many a thoughtful chuckle, Varamo invites the reader to become an accomplice in the author’s irresistible game