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, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas'...
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). Gr...
"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun, ' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream,...
"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun, ' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, whic...
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, distress, and incipient madness. The two men s uneasiness soon becomes a nightmare as the TV adventure advances with a real-life plot involving a mutant strain of killer algae to take over the world The Conversations, a reality within a fiction within a parallel reality, is hilariously funny and...
Daily conversations in outdoor cafes with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversat...
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 strange new drug, a brightly lit carousel of a slum, the kindness of strangers, gunplay... no matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira s fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira s mesmerizing...
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, t...
