Chris Andrews

"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun, ' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ..." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense...

At last, a noir novel from the Argentine master of suspense and surprises 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,...

"In The Linden Tree, the narrator, who could be Aira himself (born the same year, in the same place, a writer who is now also living in Buenos Aires) writes down his childhood memories"--

"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...

Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile . The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becomingthe "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafes and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Bolaño (Bolaño's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well...

"The Divorce tells about a recently divorced man on vacation in Buenos Aires. One afternoon he encounters a series of the most magical coincidences. While sitting at an outdoor café, absorbed in conversation with a talented video artist, he sees a young man riding by on a bicycle get thoroughly drenched by a downpour of water-seemingly from rain caught the night before in the overhead awning. The video artist knows the cyclist, who knew a mad hermetic...

"Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short-sometimes very short-stories, which she selected herself, translated by the peerless Chris Andrews. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities...