Edgardo Cozarinsky Book order

With an introduction by award-winning author Alberto Manguel, Milongas is Edgardo Cozarinsky's love letter to tango, and the diverse array of people who give it life. From tango’s origins in the gritty bars of Buenos Aires, to milongas tucked away in the crypt of a London Church, a café in Kraków, or the quays of the Seine, Cozarinsky guides us through a shape-shifting dance’s phantasmagoric past. In neighborhood dance halls vibrant and alive through the early hours of the morning, where young and old, foreign and native, novice and master come together to traverse borders, demographics, and social mores, “it is impossible to distinguish the dance from the dancer.” As conspiratorial as he is candid, Cozarinsky shares the secrets and culture of this timeless dance with us through glimmering anecdote, to celebrate its traditions, evolution, and the devotees who give it life.

Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest and Odessa, both before and after the Second World War, Edgardo Cozarinsky's stories belong to the spirit of Borges and to a great Argentine cosmopolitan that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of History, who, set down in a strange but proud land, looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memories. Cozarinsky's characters are writers, lovers, scholars, artists and dreamers. An ambitious young Jew, about to marry and embark for a new life in Argentina is accosted by an unknown woman who departs with him to Buenos Aires; a pianist in a Buenos Aires nightclub finds himself drawn back to Germany in 1937; an Argentine-American Jew travels to Lisbon to unravel the threads of his grandparents' wartime affair... They are all travellers of a kind, characters who inhabit a secret land, without frontiers.