The Famous Magician

César Aira

Hardcover

Regular price$17.95With free membership trial$8.9850% off your first book+ Free shipping

Currently restocking. Order now to reserve your copy

Do you recommend this book?

Yes!

Reader Score

72%

72% of readers

recommend this book

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?

Book Details

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: Sep 27th, 2022
Pages: 48
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.15in - 6.30in - 0.42in - 0.53lb
EAN: 9780811228893
Categories: • Literary• Occult & Supernatural• Hispanic & Latino - General

About the Author

Andrews, Chris: - The poet and translator Chris Andrews has won the Valle Inclan Prize and the French-American Translation Prize for his work.

Aira, César: - César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He won the 2021 Formentor Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker International Prize.

Praise for this book

Aira's works are like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful.--Rivka Galchen "Harpers"

Aira's cubist eye sees from every angle.--Patti Smith "New York Times Book Review"

César Aira is writing a gigantic, headlong, acrobatic fresco of modern life entirely made up of novelettes, novellas, novelitas. In other words, he is a great literary trickster, and also one of the most charming.--Adam Thirlwell

A writer's future hangs in the balance when he is tempted by an "unexpected Mephistopheles" in Aira's playful, self-reflexive latest...the story's driving question of choosing a meaningful course for one's life is timeless.-- "Publishers Weekly"

Aira's short books are the literary equivalent of a Périgord black truffle -- small, rich delicacies worth savoring and contemplating.-- "Polygon"

Aira, the Argentine master of a certain strain of unabashedly self-reflexive novella that frequently marries the ingratiating confidence of fabulism with postmodern panache, has offered his audience a wicked little piece of literary wish-fulfillment gone happily awry.--Roberto Ontiveros "Texas Observer"

The Famous Magician by Cesar Aira, translated by Chris Andrews, is my favourite of the new books. Aira is the ludicrously prolific Argentinian author of over a hundred short books that invariably come apart while somehow keeping their shape. Rules are established before being merrily violated, ho-hum personal accounts become far-fetched zombie stories, serious literary rumination gives way to comic book pastiche. The method appears to have been working: the results have been books that don't read like the ones you encounter in life but the kind you might pick up in dreams.--J.W. McCormack "The New Left Review"