César Aira: The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

PRINGLES, 6 SEPTEMBER 1996

“Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today, and should not be missed.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“Aira is a master at pivoting between the mundane and the metaphysical.”

— The Millions

“An improvisatory wildness that opens up possibilities where there had seemed to be brick walls.”

— The Paris Review

AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER

“César Aira’s strange and arresting novel, in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald. . a memorable performance whose tone and oddly compelling vision are distinctly Aira’s own.”

— Los Angeles Times

“Aira’s most dazzling novel to be published in English thus far.”

— The New York Review of Books

“Astonishing. . a supercharged Céline, writing with a Star Wars laser sword, turning Don Quixote into Picasso.”

— Harpers

“Multifaceted and transporting. . I get so absorbed that upon finishing I don’t remember anything, like a complex cinematic dream that dissipates upon awakening.”

— Patti Smith

GHOSTS

“An incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation.”

— The Los Angeles Times

“Exhilarating. Cesar Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature. Ghosts is an exercise in queasiness, a heady, vertigo-inducing fantasia.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“Between hauntings, Ghosts is filled with Aira’s beautifully precise observation of the texture of everyday life.”

— The Millions

“Aira conjures a languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and quietly menacing shadows that puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico.”

— The New Yorker

HOW I BECAME A NUN

“Oblique and darkly humorous. Through the marginal, Aira imaginatively explores the foibles of the human condition.”

— The Harvard Review

“Aira is a man of multiple, slipping masks, and How I Became a Nun is the work of an uncompromising literary trickster.”

— Time Out

“A foreboding fable of life and art.”

— Publishers Weekly

THE LITERARY CONFERENCE

“Aira’s novels are eccentric clones of reality, where the lights are brighter, the picture is sharper and everything happens at the speed of thought.”

— The Millions

“Disarming. . amusing.”

— The New Yorker

“César Aira’s tale of mad scientists, literary doubles and world domination offers a gloriously absurdist example of the ‘constant flight forward’ that powers his inimitable fiction.”

— The National

THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND

“Genius.”

— Ploughshares

“A beautiful, strange fable. . alternating between frivolity, insight, and horror.”

— Quarterly Conversation

VARAMO

“Aira seems fascinated by the idea of storytelling as invention, invention as improvisation and improvisation as transgression, as getting away with something. ”

— The New York Times Book Review

“A lampoon of our need for narrative. No one these days does metafiction like Aira.”

— The Paris Review