Böcker av Cesar Aira

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.

It is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfold: vast chasms, surreal plants and animals... But then something goes appallingly wrong. This is one of Aira's great works, filled with his baffling ability to veer between grandeur and absurdity. Each page fails to provide clues as to what lies in wait for the reader on the next.

By profession I am a soldier, a general in the glorious Roman army. As a playwright, I think of myself as a sublime amateur.In Cesar Aira's new novel, Fulgentius, a sixty-seven-year-old imperial Roman general-"Rome's most illustrious and experienced"-is sent to pacify the remote province of Pannonia.He is a thoughtful, introspective person, a saturnine intellectual who greatly enjoys being on the march away from his loving family, and the sometimes deadly intrigues of Rome. Fulgentius is also a playwright (though of exactly one play) and in every city he pacifies, he stages a grand production of his farcical tragedy (written at the tender age of twelve) about a man who becomes a famous general only to be murdered "at the hands of shadowy foreigners." Curiously, what he had imagined as a child turns out to be the story of his life, almost. As the playwright-turned-general broods obsessively about his only work, the magnificent Lupine Legion-"a city in movement" of 6,000 men, an invincible corps of seasoned fighters wearing their signature wolfskin caps-kills, burns, pillages, and loots their way to victory. But what does victory mean?

Artforum is certainly one of César Aira's most charming, quirky, and funny books to date. Consisting of a series of interrelated stories about his compulsion to collect Artforum magazine, this is not about art so much as it is about passionate obsession. At first we follow our hapless collector from magazine shops to used bookstores hunting for copies of Artforum. A friend alerts him to a copy somewhere and he obsesses about actually going to get it-will the shop be open, will the copy already be sold? Finally he takes out a subscription, but then it never comes, so he hounds the mailman. There's the day his stash of Artforums gets rained on, but only one absorbs the water. And interspersed is a wacky chapter about the mystery of the broken clothespins. "How weird." "How crazy."

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.

Marcia is sixteen and unhappy. One day, she hears a shout: 'Wannafuck?' Startled, she turns and is confronted by punk girls Lenin and Mao. She's soon beguiled, but the two have little time for philosophical discussions of love: they need proof, and with their own savage logic the duo stage a hold-up in an unforgettable splatter-fest finale.

The elegant lime trees lining the main square of Colonel Pringles bring back memories of childhood in this charming fictional memoir by Man Booker International shortlisted Cesar Aira. A colourful mosaic of a small town, The Lime Tree is a playful portrait of the artist as a child and an invitation to visit the source of Aira's imagination.

In Korea, a little Buddhist monk dreams of the Western world. He meets the holidaying French couple Napoleon Chirac and Jacqueline Bloodymary and offers to be their guide, in the hope they will take him to Europe. But though our monk seems the very spirit of tourism, nothing is natural in this tour de force of Aira's twisted imagination.

In a small town in Argentina, a seamstress is sewing a wedding dress. All of a sudden she fears that her son has been kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia. She gives chase in a taxi. Her husband finds out and takes off after her - to the end of the world, to the place where monsters are born, and where the southern wind falls hopelessly in love.