César Aira - Dinner

JUNE 28, 2005

“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

CONVERSATIONS

“In Conversations , we find ourselves again in the protagonist’s conscious and subconscious, which is mostly likely that of Mr. César Aira and consistent with prototypical Aira style. This style never fails because each time Aira is able to develop a uniquely bogus set of facts that feels as realistic as waking up each morning and going to work, despite their fantastical and unrealistic qualities.”

— Three Percent

AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER

“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.”

— Harper’s

“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. César 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

THE HARE

★ “Simultaneously an homage and deconstruction of the Victorian adventure story, Aira delivers an ingenious and acrobatic novel set on the Argentinean pampas. In his masterful hands, ambiguity eventually builds to order, mystery to revelation, and every digression turns out to have a purpose.”

— Publisher’s Weekly

“In one man’s ‘unity,’ the hare is a magnificent mammal. In another’s, it’s the foundation of a family fortune. As perspective shifts, so does meaning. Reality is no more trustworthy than interpretation; logic itself is a kind of fraud. The dramatization of these subversive ideas has been Aira’s central preoccupation for decades, and in The Hare he achieves one of his most brilliant, hilarious articulations yet.”

— NPR

HOW I BECAME A NUN

“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

THE MIRACLE CURES OF DR. AIRA

“Aira brings us face to face with the everlasting fears and feelings at the core of what it means to be human. That his methods might be peculiar and his routes crossed with monsters makes the results all the more dazzling.”

— Trop

“César Aira is indeed Dr. Aira, and the miracles are the little books he creates.”

— The Coffin Factory

THE MUSICAL BRAIN

“I don’t normally read short stories. They often make me sad, as the characters come and go so quickly and we may never see them again. But 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.”

— Patti Smith, The New York Times

“The stories here do have a life of their own, and it is a life offering much surprise, much humor, much brilliance of observation and invention.”

— Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Review of Books

THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND

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

— Quarterly Conversation

SHANTYTOWN

“There are no easy truths here, no pat judgments about good and evil. Instead, with a few final acts of narrative sleight of hand (and some odd soliloquies) the reader is left at once dazzled and unsettled.”

— Los Angeles Times

“ Shantytown is a characteristically sly palimpsest of one type of story through which sparkle multiple others.”

— The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

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