Dinner
Page 9
– The Paris Review
CONVERSATIONS
“In Conversations, we find ourselves again in the protagonist’s conscious and subconscious, which is mostly likely that of Mr. César Aira and consistent with prototypical Aira style. This style never fails because each time Aira is able to develop a uniquely bogus set of facts that feels as realistic as waking up each morning and going to work, despite their fantastical and unrealistic qualities.”
– Three Percent
AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER
“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.”
– Harper’s
“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. César 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
THE HARE
★ “Simultaneously an homage and deconstruction of the Victorian adventure story, Aira delivers an ingenious and acrobatic novel set on the Argentinean pampas. In his masterful hands, ambiguity eventually builds to order, mystery to revelation, and every digression turns out to have a purpose.”
– Publisher’s Weekly
“In one man’s ‘unity,’ the hare is a magnificent mammal. In another’s, it’s the foundation of a family fortune. As perspective shifts, so does meaning. Reality is no more trustworthy than interpretation; logic itself is a kind of fraud. The dramatization of these subversive ideas has been Aira’s central preoccupation for decades, and in The Hare he achieves one of his most brilliant, hilarious articulations yet.”
– NPR
HOW I BECAME A NUN
“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
THE MIRACLE CURES OF DR. AIRA
“Aira brings us face to face with the everlasting fears and feelings at the core of what it means to be human. That his methods might be peculiar and his routes crossed with monsters makes the results all the more dazzling.”
– Trop
“César Aira is indeed Dr. Aira, and the miracles are the little books he creates.”
– The Coffin Factory
THE MUSICAL BRAIN
“I don’t normally read short stories. They often make me sad, as the characters come and go so quickly and we may never see them again. But Aira’s stories seem like shards from an ever expanding interconnecting universe. He populates the racing void with multitudinous visions, like Indian paintings of gods vomiting gods. He executes digression with muscular lucidity.”
– Patti Smith, The New York Times
“The stories here do have a life of their own, and it is a life offering much surprise, much humor, much brilliance of observation and invention.”
– Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Review of Books
THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND
“A beautiful, strange fable . . . alternating between frivolity, insight, and horror.”
– Quarterly Conversation
SHANTYTOWN
“There are no easy truths here, no pat judgments about good and evil. Instead, with a few final acts of narrative sleight of hand (and some odd soliloquies) the reader is left at once dazzled and unsettled.”
– Los Angeles Times
“Shantytown is a characteristically sly palimpsest of one type of story through which sparkle multiple others.”
– The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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 © 2006 by César Aira
Translation copyright © 2015 by Katherine Silver
Originally published by Beatriz Viterbo Editora, Argentina, as La cena in 2006; 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
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (ndp1316) in 2015
Design by Erik Rieselbach
ISBN 978-0-8112-2108-5 (paperback)
eISBN 978-0-8112-2109-2
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011