César Aira Book order

A writer is offered a devil's bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?

A divorce leads a man to Buenos Aires. In a trendy cafe he witnesses a minor accident involving Enrique, the owner of his guest house; this accident reunites Enrique with a childhood friend, with whom he had miraculously escaped from a raging fire in a miniature replica of a boarding school. So starts a true master-yarn from Booker finalist Aira.

The narrative explores a humorous and quirky obsession with collecting Artforum magazine, showcasing the protagonist's frantic search through shops and bookstores. His journey is filled with anxieties over availability and subscription woes, leading to comical encounters, like hounding the mailman and salvaging damaged magazines. Interspersed within the collection of stories is a whimsical chapter about the mystery of broken clothespins, adding to the book's charm and eccentricity. Overall, it captures the essence of passionate obsession in a lighthearted manner.

Birthday is among the very best of Aira--it will surprise readers new to his work, and will deeply satisfy his many fans

Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today and should not be missed The New York Times

Translated into English for the first time, On Contemporary Art, a speech by the renowned novelist César 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 reproducibility of artworks to the value of the written word itself. In the end, Aira leaves us stranded on the bridge between writing and art that he set out to construct in the first place, flailing as we try to make sense of where we stand. Aira’s On Contemporary Art exemplifies what the ekphrasis series is dedicated to doing—exploring the space in which words give meaning to objects, and objects shape our words. Like the great writers Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch before him, Aira operates in the space between fiction and essay writing, art and analysis. Pursuing questions about reproducibility, art making, and limits of language, Aira’s unique voice adds new insights to the essential conversations that continue to inform our understanding of art.

Exploring themes of culture clash and identity, the first story features a small Korean Buddhist monk guiding a distressed French couple during their Far East vacation. In stark contrast, the second narrative follows two punk lesbians who violently seize a supermarket in Buenos Aires, impacting their hostages' lives. Both tales, though vastly different in setting and tone, delve into contemporary issues of sex, identity, and economics, showcasing the author's unique storytelling style in fast-paced, edgy fiction.

The Lime Tree opens with the description of a giant lime tree in the town square of Coronel Pringles. From that tree's blossom, the author's father would brew a sedative tea, an infusion associated with the recovery of childhood memories. But Aira's childhood, unlike that of Proust's narrator in In Search of Lost Time, is marked by historical events: the ousting of Peron in 1955. A devoted Peronist, Aira's father lost his job as a municipal electrician. His dreams of ascent to the middle class broken, he lapsed into sullenness while his wife reveled in her anti-Peronism.

In Korea, a little Buddhist monk (really very dwarf-sized) dreams of the Western world and secretly reads up on Western culture. When he meets the holidaying French couple Napoleon Chirac and Jacqueline Bloodymary he offers his services as their guide, in the hope they will take him, a penniless monk, to Europe. He whisks them off on a tour of the temples. Among the many twists and turns, our stunned tourists encounter a suicidal horse and discover that a person can also be a robot. Though our monk appears to them as the very spirit of tourism, nothing is natural in this tour de force of Aira's twisted imagination.

Proof brings us quickly back to the West, where two punks, plus a new recruit ("Wannafuck?" is the opening line as the two punk lesbians accost the chubby and shy Marcia on a quiet street in Buenos Aires), take control of a local supermarket with dire consequences for the hostages.