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.

In Festival, the genius postmodern sci-fi filmmaker Alec Steryx is the star guest of a film festival in an unnamed country. But he's brought a surprise: his nonagenarian mother. Everyone is baffled: Why? Half-blind and terminally cranky, she does nothing but complain, despite insisting on attending every screening and reception. As Steryx's mother gums up the works for the festival organizers, larger problems are in store ... A delightfully baroque comedy of errors, Festival, is, all at once, a loving parody of the institutions that support artists, a meditation on postmodern art, and a propulsive, lyrical, surreal adventure. In the far, far, future, a middle-aged father has fallen behind the times. Bemused and disturbed, he watches his children play the eponymous Game of the Worlds, a Total Reality war game that involves the annihilation of countless alien civilizations-which are at least as real as the narrator's own. As he debates the ethics of the game, struggles with his home's "intelligent system," and fumblingly manipulates his Discourse Corrector (a dead ringer for ChatGPT) on virtual beachside dates, an errant thought threatens to set a world-ending chain of logic into motion: the return of the Idea of God... Epic and domestic, madcap and musing by turns, this prescient novel reads like a message in a bottle from a bewitchingly strange yet all-too familiar future.

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.