Three Novels by Cesar Aira

Description

Three novellas by one of the most idiosyncratic and unusual international writers today, packaged as an Essential for the first time 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 Cesar Aira travels to a literary conference, intent on world domination . . .

Cesar Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. One of the most prolific writers in Argentina, Aira has published more than seventy books.

Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today and should not be missed * The New York Times * Aira has written over seventy books. They are mostly novels, mostly slim, and mostly astoundingly good. He reminds me of Philip K. Dick, of Honore de Balzac, of Machado de Assis, and of Soren Kierkegaard... all of which is simply to say that he is without compare -- Rivka Galchen * The New Yorker * Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald -- Mark Doty * Los Angeles Times * The author who nowadays is perhaps the most original shocking, the most exciting and subversive Spanish narrative writer: Cesar Aira -- Ignacio Echeverri He is an improviser, his work a performance on the page. But experimental, improvisational, performative and dream-like as Aira's many marvellous books are, they also reveal him to be no less of a traditionalist, responding to the most ancient custom of storytelling as a way of passing the hours of the night * Judges' citation, The Man Booker International Prize 2015 * Cesar Aira is writing a gigantic, headlong, acrobatic fresco of modern life entirely made up of novelettes, novellas, novellitos... In other words, he is a great literary trickster, and also one of the most charming -- Adam Thirlwell 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 * Cesar Aira's body of work is a perfect machine for invention-he writes without necessity or any apparent forebears, always as if for the first time -- Maria Moreno * BOMB Magazine * If there's currently a writer who defies all classification that writer is Cesar Aira. Once you've read Aira, you don't want to stop. Aira is an eccentric, but he's also one of the three or four best Spanish-language writers alive today -- Roberto Bolano Aira's works are like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful -- Rivka Galchen * Harper's * Aira's novels display a consistent engagement with the importance of storytelling and the act of writing. The engrossing power of his work comes from how he carries out these feats: with the inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after imaginary enemies in the park * Los Angeles Review of Books * To love the novels of Cesar Aira you must have a taste for the absurd, a tolerance for the obscurely philosophical and a willingness to laugh out loud against your better judgment * NPR Books * Aira's charm is subtle, unobtrusive, it doesn't try to seduce with cheap likeability. He takes a leisurely stroll through his scenes. It's as if Machado de Assis got redrafted by Bolano and edited by Anatole France * Bookslut * Cesar Aira's novels are the narrative equivalent of the Exquisite Corpse, that Surrealist parlor game in which players add to drawings or stories without knowledge of previous or subsequent additions. Wildly heterogeneous elements are thrown together, and the final result never fails to surprise and amuse * The Millions * In spite of the apparent randomness of his ideas and the pacing of his breaks, surprises, and cuts in time, he inspires a sort of willingness in the reader to be taken aback; any reader-untrusting or submissive-might enjoy them as if they had pressed "shuffle" on their favorite pop band's discography * Ox and Pigeon * What's really unique about Aira's output, considering the speed with which he 'flies forward' (seemingly by the seat of his pants), isn't that he produces so much work, or that it's fanciful and odd, but that what he's produced forms a coherent body of work - and one that's consistently enjoyable to read * The Argentina Independent * A manifestly gifted writer * The Quarterly Conversation * Astonishing-turns Don Quixote into Picasso * Harper's *