Antonio di Benedetto was an Argentine journalist and writer whose work is deeply rooted in existentialist concerns, drawing inspiration from authors like Dostoevsky and Pirandello. His novels, most famously the existential masterpiece Zama, delve into profound questions of human existence and the search for meaning. Critics often draw parallels between his distinctive prose and the literary innovations of the French nouveau roman and other prominent Latin American writers. Di Benedetto masterfully captures unique atmospheres and explores themes of isolation, identity, and the human condition.
The narrative follows a reporter investigating a series of seemingly unrelated suicides, delving into the broader implications and existential themes surrounding the act of suicide. This exploration serves as a profound reflection on life and despair, culminating in the third and final installment of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation. The novel combines elegant prose with deep philosophical inquiry, making it a compelling read for those interested in the human condition.
In post-WWII South America, a struggling writer embarks on a murderous thought experiment to help kickstart his career in this next tale of longing from the author of Zama. The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in middle management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him, however often he and his mother and wife move in search of it. He thinks of embarking on his writing career with something simple, a detective novel, and ponders the possibility of choos- ing a victim among the people he knows and planning a crime as if he himself were the killer. That way, he hopes, his book might finally begin to take shape. The Silentiary, along with Zama and The Suicides, is one of the three thematically linked novels by Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication “To the victims of expectation” in Zama. Together they constitute, in Juan José Saer’s words, “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish.”
In her most personal book to date, Yayoi Kusama brings us into her private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her paintings, sculptures, and daily life.With a new focus on Yayoi Kusama’s use of language, this book features an impressive overview of her poetry, which the artist creates alongside her work in other mediums. Highlighting the importance of words to the artist, the book draws special attention to the captivating, poetic titles of her paintings, such as in I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU THE INFINITE SPLENDOR OF STARDUST IN THE UNIVERSE and FIGURE OF THE MIDNIGHT DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT I DEDICATED ALL MY HEART . These visionary titles are a quintessential part of Kusama’s eye-catching artworks, but also hold their own as unique aphorisms and appealing statements of cosmic spirituality. The poetry also collected here touches on Kusama’s personal trials, her human ideals, and her heroic pursuit of art above all else.Centered around EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE , Kusama’s acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, the book features more than 300 pages of new paintings, sculptures, and Infinity Mirror Rooms . It also includes photographs of Kusama over time, offering a unique visual timeline of this iconic artist.
A career retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, Japan’s most prominent artist and “Queen of Polka Dots,” covering all aspects of her provocative work. Avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama’s matchless creativity and originality have been captivating the world for more than six decades. Her retrospective exhibitions in four major European and American museums have seen record attendance. Yayoi Kusama , originally published to accompany a sellout exhibition at the Matsumoto City Museum of Art, offers an overview of Kusama’s entire career, including works from her youth, when she indulged in drawing in order to escape from her hallucinations; paintings made when she was based in New York, including “Infinity Nets” and “Polka Dots,” and her happenings in places such as Central Park; her immersive mirrored infinity rooms from the 1980s and 1990s, when she participated in the Venice Biennale; and last but not least, the ongoing large-scale series “My Eternal Soul.” Kusama has continuously innovated and reinvented her style; well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and immersive installation. Featuring an essay by Akira Shibutami analyzing Kusama’s work, this comprehensive publication celebrates one of Japan’s most important artists. 350 color illustrations
Exploring themes of trauma and resilience, the collection features twenty stories that reflect Antonio di Benedetto's diverse experiences from youth in Argentina to exile in Spain. Through a blend of genres, these narratives delve into the impact of civilization on human consciousness, shaped by the author's harrowing experiences during Argentina's military dictatorship. Celebrated as a master of the short story form, this volume is the first comprehensive English collection of Benedetto's work, showcasing his profound literary legacy.
An NYRB Classics Original First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good. Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.
