Synopses & Reviews
Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter's life hangs in the balance.
Review
"Once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop." Roberto Bolaño
Review
"A languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and quietly menacing shadows...puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico." The New Yorker
Review
"Wonderful...Ghosts is an incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation." Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times
Review
"Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald, those great late modernists for whom fiction was a theater of ideas." Mark Doty, Los Angeles Times
Review
"Utterly astonishing." San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
The most unsettling and stunning of Aira's short novels published so far by New Directions.
About the Author
César Aira(b. 1949) was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina and has published more than 70 books. In his own novel
La silla del guila, Carlos Fuentes imagines that in 2020, César Aira wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his Roberto Bolaño translations. A poet who lives and teaches in Australia, he has translated eight Bolaño books and three novels by César Aira for New Directions.