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An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by AIRA CESAR
Category: Fiction
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, Arg ...Show more
Dinner by Cesar Aira
Category: Fiction
One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother dine with a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors. They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off ...Show more
Ema the Captive by Cesar Aira
Category: Fiction
In nineteenth-century Argentina, Ema, a delicate woman of indeterminate origins, is captured by soldiers and taken, along with with her newborn babe, to live as a concubine in a crude fort on the very edges of civilization. The trip is appalling (deprivations and rapes prevail along the way), yet the re ...Show more
Ghosts by Cesar Aira
Category: Fiction
"On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would h ...Show more
How I Became a Nun by AIRA CESAR
Category: Fiction
The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexib ...Show more
On Contemporary Art by Cesar Aira
Category: Art and Design | Series: Ekphrasis Ser.
Translated into English for the first time, On Contemporary Art, a speech by the renowned novelist C sar Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts. On Aira's dizzying and dazzling path, everything comes under question--from repr ...Show more
Shantytown by Cesar Aira
Category: Fiction
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 ...Show more
THE LITERARY CONFERENCE by AIRA CESAR
Category: Fiction
Cesar is a translator who’s fallen on very hard times due to the global economic downturn; he is also an author, and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. Even so, Cesar’s ...Show more
The Conversations by Cesar Aira
Category: Fiction
Daily conversations in outdoor cafes with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera's goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, dist ...Show more
The Hare by Cesar Aira
Category: Fiction
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 ...Show more
The Musical Brain: And Other Stories by Cesar Aira
Category: Fiction
A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, Cesar Aira-the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long-The Musical Brain Other Stories comprises twenty tales about oddballs, freaks, and loonies. Aira, with his fuga hacia adelan ...Show more