Synopses & Reviews
A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, Cesar Aira the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long The Musical Brain comprises twenty tales about oddballs, freaks, and loonies. Aira, with his fuga hacia adelante or "flight forward" into the unknown, gives us imponderables to ponder and bizarre and seemingly out-of-context plot lines, as well as thoughtful and passionate takes on everyday reality. The title story, first published in the New Yorker, is the creme de la creme of this exhilarating collection.
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"Once you start reading Aira, you don't want to stop." Roberto Bolaño
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"Aira's cubist eye sees from every angle." Patti Smith, The New York Times Book Review
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"Astonishing — turns Don Quixote into Picasso." Harper's
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"Exhilarating. César Aira is the Duchamp of Latin American literature. Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today and should not be missed." Natasha Wimmer, The New York Times
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"César Aira is Argentina's greatest living author." Marcela Valdes, The Nation
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"Cerebral, witty, fanciful and idiosyncratic." Aura Estrada, Boston Review
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"Aira oversteps the bounds of realism, forcing the world to live up to his imagination." Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun
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"Aira delivers one surreal unraveling of reality after another that proceeds paradox by paradox into psychic realms" Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
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"Aira's novels parody narrative form, destroy normal cause and effect, and contain bold conceptual dialogues." The Guardian
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"Aira stresses the sublime without falling back on the props of magical realism" Michael Eaude Times Literary Supplement
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"The first collection of Aira's stories might be his masterpiece." Cristopher Byrd The Believer
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"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." Publishers Weekly, (starred review)
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"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 Review of Books
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"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
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"What a gift: to look forward to reading a new Aira novel from New Directions every year for the rest of one's life." Los Angeles Times
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"Irreverent inventiveness...without analogue in contemporary literature" San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. Wildly popular in Latin America, he has published more than seventy books of short fictions and essays.
The poet Chris Andrews has translated many books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions.