by Cesar Aira
PRINGLES, 6 SEPTEMBER 1996
PRAISE FOR CÉSAR AIRA
“Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today, and should not be missed.”
– The New York Times Book Review
“Aira is a master at pivoting between the mundane and the metaphysical.”
– The Millions
“An improvisatory wildness that opens up possibilities where there had seemed to be brick walls.”
– The Paris Review
AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER
“César Aira’s strange and arresting novel, in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald . . . a memorable performance whose tone and oddly compelling vision are distinctly Aira’s own.”
– Los Angeles Times
“Aira’s most dazzling novel to be published in English thus far.”
– The New York Review of Books
“Astonishing . . . a supercharged Céline, writing with a Star Wars laser sword, turning Don Quixote into Picasso.”
– Harpers
“Multifaceted and transporting . . . I get so absorbed that upon finishing I don’t remember anything, like a complex cinematic dream that dissipates upon awakening.”
– Patti Smith
GHOSTS
“An incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation.”
– The Los Angeles Times
“Exhilarating. Cesar Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature. Ghosts is an exercise in queasiness, a heady, vertigo-inducing fantasia.”
– The New York Times Book Review
“Between hauntings, Ghosts is filled with Aira’s beautifully precise observation of the texture of everyday life.”
– The Millions
“Aira conjures a languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and quietly menacing shadows that puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico.”
– The New Yorker
HOW I BECAME A NUN
“Oblique and darkly humorous. Through the marginal, Aira imaginatively explores the foibles of the human condition.”
– The Harvard Review
“Aira is a man of multiple, slipping masks, and How I Became a Nun is the work of an uncompromising literary trickster.”
– Time Out
“A foreboding fable of life and art.”
– Publishers Weekly
THE LITERARY CONFERENCE
“Aira’s novels are eccentric clones of reality, where the lights are brighter, the picture is sharper and everything happens at the speed of thought.”
– The Millions
“Disarming . . . amusing.”
– The New Yorker
“César Aira’s tale of mad scientists, literary doubles and world domination offers a gloriously absurdist example of the ‘constant flight forward’ that powers his inimitable fiction.”
– The National
THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND
“Genius.”
– Ploughshares
“A beautiful, strange fable . . . alternating between frivolity, insight, and horror.”
– Quarterly Conversation
VARAMO
“Aira seems fascinated by the idea of storytelling as invention, invention as improvisation and improvisation as transgression, as getting away with something.”
– The New York Times Book Review
“A lampoon of our need for narrative. No one these days does metafiction like Aira.”
– The Paris Review
Copyright © 2002 by César Aira
Translation copyright © 2012 by Katherine Silver
Originally published by Ediciones Simurg, Buenos Aires, 1998; published in conjunction with the literary Agency Michael Gaeb/Berlin
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (ndp1238) in 2012
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aira, César, 1949–
[Curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira. English]
The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira / by César Aira ; translated by Katherine Silver.
p. cm.
eISBN 978-0-8112-2000-2
I. Silver, Katherine. II. Title.
PQ7798.1.I7C8713 2012
863'.64—dc23
2012012936
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
Also by César Aira from New Directions
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Ghosts
How I Became a Nun
The Literary Conference
The Seamstress and the Wind
Varamo
