Search results for ""Author Chris Andrews""
Rowman & Littlefield Hiking Hot Springs in the Southwest: A Guide to the Area's Best Backcountry Hot Springs
Whether you're seeking a soak in naturally heated mineral water or out for a sightseeing adventure, this guides you to more than 100 of the best sites for soaking in the beauty of the region. Author Chris Andrews reveals his favorite "hot spots," from primitive pools in the backcountry to handcrafted bathhouses surrounded by civilization. Look inside to find: Full-color photos Color, GPS-compatible maps and detailed directions Historical background information on the springs and their surroundings Tips on safety, access, and availability of services Best time of year, restrictions, water temperature, camping info, and much more
£17.09
Columbia University Press Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe
Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolano's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging with its distinct style and key thematic concerns, incorporating his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction. Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolano's novels, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile, while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolano's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolano's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolano emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto Bolano's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.
£72.00
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Guernsey Diary 2025
Spiral bound, 18 month diary (September 2024 - February 2026) with a week to a page. Interspersed with 32 colour photographs of the Islands of Guernsey, Sark, Herm & Alderney - seascapes and landscapes. Includes 2026 year planner. Lies flat when open.
£9.99
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Jersey: A Little Souvenir
A souvenir picture book containing over 60 colour photographs, which shows the charm of the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands.
£7.76
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Henley on Thames Little Souvenir Book
A souvenir book, with over 60 colour photographs showing the charm of this town well know for it's rowing and Royal Regatta.
£7.76
McGill-Queen's University Press How to Do Things with Forms: The Oulipo and Its Inventions
The Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) is a literary think tank that brings together writers and mathematicians. Since 1960, its worldwide influence has refreshed ways of making and thinking about literature.How to Do Things with Forms assesses the work of the group, explores where it came from, and envisages its future. Redefining the Oulipo’s key concept of the constraint in a clear and rigorous way, Chris Andrews weighs the roles of craft and imitation in the group’s practice. He highlights the importance of translation for the Oulipo’s writers, explaining how their new forms convey meanings and how these famously playful authors are also moved by serious concerns. Offering fresh interpretations of emblematic Oulipian works such as Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, Andrews also examines lesser-known texts by Jacques Roubaud, Anne F. Garréta, and Michelle Grangaud.How to Do Things with Forms addresses questions of interest to anyone involved in the making of literature, illuminating how writers decide when to stop revising, the risks and benefits of a project mentality in creative writing, and ways of holding a reader’s interest for as long as possible.
£95.00
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Cotswolds Small Square Calendar - 2024
Photographic wall calendar showing 12 views of the villages and landscapes of the Cotswolds. Calendar opens up to show a picture and dates. Wiro-o-bound - will either hang on the wall or stand on desk Open & Closed size: 152 x 152mm
£7.95
Creative Manuscript Services Script Planner: A workbook for Outlining 3 Scripts: 3-script edition
£6.66
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Oxford Colleges A5 Calendar 2025
Slimline, photographic wall calendar showing 12 views of Oxford's Colleges and University buildings. Calendar opens up to show a picture at the top and date boxes for writing in at the bottom
£7.68
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Cotswolds A5 Calendar 2024
A5, slimline photographic wall calendar showing 12 views of the villages and landscapes of the Cotswolds. Calendar opens up to show a picture at the top and date boxes for writing in at the bottom.
£7.08
New Directions Publishing Corporation Fulgentius
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?
£12.07
New Directions Publishing Corporation Our Riches
Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto “by the young, for the young,” discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. Our Riches interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.
£12.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Last Evenings on Earth
"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid. In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bolano writes in the opening sentence: "It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died." Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.
£12.99
And Other Stories Birthday
`Suddenly it hits you: you're not twenty; you're not young any more . . . and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the world has changed.'Birthday begins with a fiftieth birthday. It comes and goes without fanfare, but just a few months later, an apparently banal comment that reveals a gap in the author's knowledge of the world prompts him to sit down in a cafe and write. As he sifts through anecdotes and weaves memories together, Aira reflects on the origin of his beliefs and his incapacity to live, on literature understood from the author's and the reader's point of view, on death and the Last Judgement.
£8.23
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Cotswolds Mini Desktop Calendar - 2024
A mini desktop calendar, housed in a CD case which will sit on your desk. Showing 12 images of the Cotswolds - villages and landscapes Size: 98mm x 98mm
£6.69
Ulmer Eugen Verlag Fischkrankheiten Vorbeugen erkennen behandeln
£35.91
McGill-Queen's University Press How to Do Things with Forms: The Oulipo and Its Inventions
The Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) is a literary think tank that brings together writers and mathematicians. Since 1960, its worldwide influence has refreshed ways of making and thinking about literature.How to Do Things with Forms assesses the work of the group, explores where it came from, and envisages its future. Redefining the Oulipo’s key concept of the constraint in a clear and rigorous way, Chris Andrews weighs the roles of craft and imitation in the group’s practice. He highlights the importance of translation for the Oulipo’s writers, explaining how their new forms convey meanings and how these famously playful authors are also moved by serious concerns. Offering fresh interpretations of emblematic Oulipian works such as Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, Andrews also examines lesser-known texts by Jacques Roubaud, Anne F. Garréta, and Michelle Grangaud.How to Do Things with Forms addresses questions of interest to anyone involved in the making of literature, illuminating how writers decide when to stop revising, the risks and benefits of a project mentality in creative writing, and ways of holding a reader’s interest for as long as possible.
£28.99
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Alderney A4 Calendar 2025
Photographic wall calendar showing 12 views of the Island of Alderney - seascape and landscapes. Calendar opens up to show a picture at the top and large date boxes for writing in.
£9.99
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Cotswolds Large Desktop Calendar 2025
A large desktop calendar, housed in a CD case which will sit on your desk. Showing 12 images of the Cotswolds landscape and villages. Size: 140mm x 125mm.
£7.08
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Alderney A4 Calendar - 2024
Photographic wall calendar showing 12 views of the Island of Alderney - seascape and landscapes. Calendar opens up to show a picture at the top and large date boxes for writing in. Closed size: 298 x 210mm Open size: 298 x 420mm
£8.92
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Cheltenham: Little Souvenir
A souvenir picture book, which contains over 60 colour photographs of the Regency Town of Cheltenham.
£7.76
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Cotswolds, South: Little Souvenir Book
Serves as a souvenir book, that includes over 60 colour photographs, showing the idyllic southern areas of the Cotswolds.
£7.76
The Waywiser Press Lime Green Chair: Poems
£8.99
Columbia University Press Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe
Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolano's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging with its distinct style and key thematic concerns, incorporating his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction. Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolano's novels, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile, while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolano's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolano's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolano emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto Bolano's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.
£20.00
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Oxford Large Desktop Calendar 2025
A large desktop calendar, housed in a CD case which will sit on your desk. Showing 12 images of Oxford. Size: 140mm x 125mm
£7.08
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Cotswolds Diary - 2024
Spiral bound, 16 month diary with a week to a page. Interspersed with 31 colour photographs of the Cotswolds - villages and landscapes. Includes 2021 year planner. Lies flat when open
£11.64
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Alderney - A Little Souvenir
A souvenir picture book which contains over 60 colour photographs of the Channel Island of Alderney
£7.76
Chris Andrews/Oxford Picture Library Oxford Little Souvenir Book
A souvenir picture book, with over 60 colour photographs showing the atmosphere of this historic city.
£7.76
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Musical Brain: And Other Stories
A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, César Aira–the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long–The Musical Brain & Other Stories 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.
£23.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Return
The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories that seem to tell what Bolano called “the secret story,” “the one we’ll never know.” Bent on returning to haunt you, Bolano’s tales might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or soccer, witchcraft, or a dream of meeting the poet Enrique Lihn:they always surprise. Consider the title story: a young partygoer collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor. Just as his soul is departing his body,it realizes strange happenings are afoot around his now dead body — and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolano’s own).
£12.74
New Directions Publishing Corporation Varamo
Unmistakably the work of César Aira, Varamo is about the day in the life of a hapless government employee who, after wandering around all night after being paid by the Ministry in counterfeit money, eventually writes the most celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Boy. What is odd is that, at fifty years old, Varamo “hadn’t previously written one sole verse, nor had it ever occurred to him to write one.” Among other things, this novella is an ironic allegory of the poet’s vocation and inspiration, the subtlety of artistic genius, and our need to give literature an historic, national, psychological, and aesthetic context. But Aira goes further still — converting the ironic allegory into a formidable parody of the expectations that all narrative texts generate — by laying out the pathos of a man who between one night and the following morning is touched by genius. Once again Aira surprises us with his unclassifiable fiction: original and enjoyable, worthy of many a thoughtful chuckle, Varamo invites the reader to become an accomplice in the author’s irresistible game.
£10.96
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Return
As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolano’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories bent on returning to haunt you. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolano story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot—and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolano’s own). Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bolano’s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.
£18.99
Profile Books Ltd A Bookshop in Algiers
'A beautiful little novel about books, history, ambition and the importance of literature.' Nick Hornby 'Truly potent ... Adimi confronts us with episodes that are simply never spoken of in France' The New York Times Book Review In 1936, a young dreamer named Edmond Charlot opened a modest bookshop in Algiers. Once the heart of Algerian cultural life, where Camus launched his first book and the Free French printed propaganda during the war, Charlot's beloved bookshop has been closed for decades, living on as a government lending library. Now it is to be shuttered forever. But as a young man named Ryad empties it of its books, he begins to understand that a bookshop can be much more than just a shop that sells books. A Bookshop in Algiers charts the changing fortunes of Charlot's bookshop through the political drama of Algeria's turbulent twentieth century of war, revolution and independence. It is a moving celebration of books, bookshops and of those who dare to dream.
£8.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation You Glow in the Dark
The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi’s writing—at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific—casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: was that realistic or fantastic? Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation—the book's stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there’s the lift of her vivid sense of humor. You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader's attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent.
£11.99
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Ludlow and the Shropshire Hills: Ironbridge and the Severn Gorge
This is a little souvenir book with over 60 color photographs showing images of the county of Shropshire, including Ludlow and the Ironbridge.
£7.76
Chris Andrews/Oxford Picture Library Guernsey Sark and Herm: A View of the Islands
Shows colour images of the life on and coast line of the Channel Islands of Guernsey, Sark & Herm.
£10.00
New Directions Publishing Corporation Birthday
Before you know it you are no longer young, and by the way, while you were thinking about other things, the world was changing—and then, just as suddenly you realize that you are fifty years old. Aira had anticipated his fiftieth—a time when he would not so much recall years past as look forward to what lies ahead—but the birthday came and went without much ado. It was only months later, while having a somewhat banal conversation with his wife about the phases of the moon, that he realized how little he really knows about his life. In Birthday Aira searches for the events that were significant to him during his first fifty years. Between anecdotes ,and memories, the author ponders the origins of his personal truths, and meditates on literature meant as much for the writer as for the reader, on ignorance, knowledge, and death. Finally, Birthday is a little sad, in a serene, crystal-clear kind of way, which makes it even more irresistible.
£11.65
New Directions Publishing Corporation Ghosts
"On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course." — from Ghosts 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.
£12.02
Pan Macmillan Nazi Literature in the Americas
Featuring several mass-murdering authors, two fraternal writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring and a poet who crafts his lines in the air with sky writing, Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas details the lives of a rich cast of characters from one of the most extraordinary imaginations in world literature. Written with sharp wit and virtuosic flair, this encyclopaedic group of fictional pan-American authors is the terrifyingly humorous and remarkably inventive masterpiece which made Bolaño famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
£9.99
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd Cotswold Scene: A View of the Hills and Surrounding Areas, Including Bath and Stratford Upon Avon
This is a landscape format, paperback book, showing the charm of the Cotswold Villages. It contains 160 pages consisting mainly of colour photographs with 'single line' text descriptions. It also includes text and colour photographs of Bath in the South and Stratford upon Avon in the North.
£12.82
Chris Andrews Publications Ltd The Chilterns: A Little Souvenir
A pocket sized little souvenir book with over 64 colour photographs and illustrations of some of the towns and villages in 'The Chilterns' area.
£7.76
Vintage Publishing By Night in Chile
Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the ‘wizened youth’ who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later.Translated by Chris AndrewsElegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.
£9.99
And Other Stories The Divorce
Shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize Shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclan prize for its translation A recently divorced man trying to enjoy himself in one of the trendier districts of Buenos Aires finds himself at the centre a series of strange coincidences. These blips in causality are at first easily rationalised, but soon escalate from the merely implausible to the impossible to the cataclysmic. More, each accident of fate, piling one atop the other, drags a new, rambling tale in its wake, until the very ground beneath the man's feet seems likely to buckle beneath the weight of so many shaggy dogs. And yet, with master storyteller Cesar Aira holding their leashes, what better vacation from reality could any reader-or divorce-desire?
£8.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Shantytown
Maxi, a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires’s shantytown, attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone — including two innocent teenage girls — to break a drug ring that he believes is operating within the slum. A strange new drug, a brightly lit carousel of a slum, the kindness of strangers, gunplay... no matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira’s “fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics” (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira’s mesmerizing work, is filled with wonder and mad invention.
£12.57
New Directions Publishing Corporation Amulet
Amulet is a monologue, like Bolano's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the '70s, and the last words of the novel are: "And that song is our amulet."
£13.35
New Directions Publishing Corporation Nazi Literature in the Americas
Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolano's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition. Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7).
£13.20
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Famous Magician
A certain writer ("past sixty, enjoying 'a certain renown'") strolls through the old book market in a Buenos Aires park: "My Sunday walk through the market, repeated over so many years, was part of my general fantasizing about books." Unfortunately, he is suffering from writer's block. However, that proves to be the least of our hero's problems. In the market, he fails to avoid the insufferable boor Ovando—"a complete loser" but a "man supremely full of himself: Conceit was never less justified." And yet, is Ovando a master magician? Can he turn sugar cubes into pure gold? And can our protagonist decline the offer Ovando proposes granting him absolute power if the writer never in his life reads another book? And is his publisher also a great magician? And the writer's wife? Only César Aira could have cooked up this witch's potion (and only he would plop in phantom Mont Blanc pens as well as fearsome crocodiles from the banks of the Nile)—a brew bubbling over with the question: where does literature end and magic begin?
£12.99
Charco Press The Wind That Lays Waste
Leni crossed her arms, said nothing, and watched the fight unfold. She was like a bored onlooker at a boxing trial, wasting no energy on the undercard, saving her passion for the moment when the real champions would step into the ring. And yet, at some point, she began to cry. Just tears, without any sound. Water falling from her eyes as water was falling from the sky. Rain disappearing into rain.The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is an evangelist preaching the word of God across northern Argentina with Leni, his teenage daughter, in tow. When their car breaks down, fate leads them to the workshop of an ageing mechanic, Gringo Brauer, and his assistant, a boy called Tapioca. Over the course of a long day, curiosity and a sense of new opportunities develop into an unexpected intimacy. Yet this encounter between a man convinced of his righteousness and one mired in cynicism and apathy will become a battle for the very souls of the young pair: the quietly earnest and idealistic mechanic’s assistant, and the restless, sceptical preacher’s daughter. As tensions among the four ebb and flow, beliefs are questioned and allegiances tested, until finally the growing storm breaks over the plains.Selva Almada’s exquisitely crafted debut, with its limpid and confident prose, is profound and poetic, a near-tangible experience of the landscape amid the hot winds, wrecked cars, sweat-stained shirts and damaged lives, told with the cinematic precision of a static road movie, like a Paris, Texas of the south. With echoes of Carson McCullers, The Wind That Lays Waste is a contemplative and powerfully distinctive novel that marks the arrival in English of an author whose talent and poise are undeniable.
£10.65