Download or read book The Literary Conference New Directions Pearls written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New in the New Directions Pearls series: an extremely rich mad scientist attempts to clone a leading genius in a bid to take over the world. César is a translator who’s fallen on very hard times due to the global economic downturn; he is also an author, and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. Even so, César’s bid for world domination comes first and so he attends a literary conference to be near the man whose clone he hopes will lead an army to victory: the world-renowned Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes. A comic science fiction fantasy of the first order, The Literary Conference is the perfect vehicle for César Aira’s take over of literature in the 21st century.
Download or read book The Literary Conference New Directions Pearls written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New in the New Directions Pearls series: an extremely rich mad scientist attempts to clone a leading genius in a bid to take over the world. César is a translator who’s fallen on very hard times due to the global economic downturn; he is also an author, and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. Even so, César’s bid for world domination comes first and so he attends a literary conference to be near the man whose clone he hopes will lead an army to victory: the world-renowned Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes. A comic science fiction fantasy of the first order, The Literary Conference is the perfect vehicle for César Aira’s take over of literature in the 21st century.
Download or read book Bad Nature or With Elvis in Mexico New Directions Pearls written by Javier Marías and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2010-02-24 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gem of a Marías story: Elvis and his entourage abandon their translator in a seedy cantina full of enraged criminals. “It all happened because of Elvis Presley.” Elvis, down south of the border to film a movie, has insisted his producers hire a proper Spaniard so that he can pronounce his few lines in Spanish with a Castillian accent. But Ruibérriz has taken on much more than he bargained for. One fatal night, horseplay in a local bar goes too far: a fatuous drunken American insults the local kingpin, and when the thug insists that Ruibérriz translate, Elvis himself adds an even more stinging comment—and who must translate that?
Download or read book The Hare written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a Mapuche chief suddenly goes missing, a British naturalist is asked to find him in the vast Argentine pampas Clarke, a nineteenth-century English naturalist, roams the pampas in search of that most elusive and rare animal: the Legibrerian hare, whose defining quality seems to be its ability to fly. The local Indians, pointing skyward, report recent sightings of the hare but then ask Clarke to help them search for their missing chief as well. On further investigation Clarke finds more than meets the eye:in the Mapuche and Voroga languages every word has at least two meanings.Witty, very ironic, and with all the usual Airian digressive magic, The Hare offers subtle reflections on love, Victorian-era colonialism, and the many ambiguities of language.
Download or read book The Little Buddhist Monk The Proof written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two completely different stories by the inimitable César Aira The Little Buddhist Monk is a story of Asian invention gone wild, as a diminutive Korean Buddhist monk acts as a tour guide to an increasingly distraught French couple on a working vacation in the Far East. Proof brings us quickly back to the West, where two punks, plus a new recruit (“Wannafuck?” is the opening line as the two punk lesbians accost the chubby and shy Marcia on a quiet street in Buenos Aires), take control of a local supermarket with dire consequences for the hostages. These two Aira works are as different as night and day. Nevertheless, sex, identity, and modern day economics figure deeply in both of these fast-paced, edgy fictions.
Download or read book Birthday written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Birthday is among the very best of Aira—it will surprise readers new to his work, and will deeply satisfy his many fans 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.
Download or read book On Booze New Directions Pearls written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best drinking stories makes this the most intoxicating New Directions Pearl yet! “First you take a drink,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works never before published by New Directions. On Booze portrays “The Jazz Age” as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush — with quite a hangover.
Download or read book The Linden Tree written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delightful fictional account of the small town Ce´sar Aira grew up in—not so long ago A delightful fictional memoir about César Aira's small hometown. The narrator, born the same year and now living in the same great city (Buenos Aires) as César Aira, could be the author himself. Beginning with his parents—an enigmatic handsome black father who gathered linden flowers for his sleep-inducing tea and an irrational, crippled mother of European descent—the narrator catalogs memories of his childhood: his friends, his peculiar first job, his many gossiping neighbors, and the landscape and architecture of the provinces. The Linden Tree beautifully brings back to life that period in Argentina when the poor, under the guiding hand of Eva Perón, aspired to a newly created middle class. As it moves from anecdote to anecdote, this charming short novella—touching, funny, and sometimes surreal—invites the reader to visit the source of Aira's extraordinary imagination.
Download or read book How I Became a Nun written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A good story and first-rate social science."—New York Times Book Review. A sinisterly funny modern-day Through the Looking Glass that begins with cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream. The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility, and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere. As Nicholas Lemann put it in The New Yorker, "Krech is more than just a conventional-wisdom overturner; he has a serious larger point to make. . . . Concepts like ecology, waste, preservation, and even the natural (as distinct from human) world are entirely anachronistic when applied to Indians in the days before the European settlement of North America." "Offers a more complex portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to embrace."—Washington Post "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 and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention. A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.
Download or read book Dinner written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was it a nightmare—the result of a bad case of indigestion—or did something truly scary happen after dinner in the Argentine town of Coronel Pringles? One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother dine with a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors. They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old windup toys and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about the dead rising from their graves, leaving the cemetery, and sucking the blood of the living—all somehow, disturbingly reminiscent of the dinner party.
Download or read book The Leviathan New Directions Pearls written by Joseph Roth and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2011-06-29 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Roth’s final novella, The Leviathan, concerns a shtetl’s finest coral merchant and how his dream of seeing the sea for the first time materializes at a terrible cost. In the small town of Progrody, Nissen Piczenik makes his living as the most respected coral merchant of the region. Nissen has never been outside of his town, deep in the Russian interior, and fantasizes that a Leviathan watches over the coral reefs. When the sailor nephew of one of Progrody’s residents comes to visit, Nissen loses little time in befriending him for the purpose of learning about the sea. The sailor offers Nissen a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come to Odessa and tour his ship. Nissen leaves his business during the peak coral season, and stays in Odessa for three weeks. But upon his return to Progrody, Nissen finds that a new coral merchant has moved into the neighboring town, and his coral is quickly becoming the most sought after. As his customers dwindle, life takes an evil twist for Nissen Piczenik. And the final decider of his fate may be the devil himself.
Download or read book Morphine New Directions Pearls written by Mikhail Bulgakov and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Master and Margarita comes this short and tragic masterpiece about drug addiction Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend’s aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov’s uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction — his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.
Download or read book Never Love a Gambler New Directions Pearls written by Keith Ridgway and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Never Love a Gambler,' the Irish writer Keith Ridgway flips conventional narrative with unconventional drama. His charcters negotiate their way through love and lust, religious obsession and ghost sightings, crimes and disappearance in stories told with innovative mastery and brightened by fiercely vivid dialogue. Here, Ridgway showcases his brilliance as a bracing and violently funny storyteller.
Download or read book The Night Before Christmas New Directions Pearls written by Nikolai Gogol and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nikolai Gogol's hilarious and macabre tale of a Christmas Eve with a devil and a romantic twist. It is the night before Christmas and devilry is afoot. The devil steals the moon and hides it in his pocket. He is thus free to run amok and inflicts all sorts of wicked mischief upon the village of Dikanka by unleashing a snowstorm. But the one he’d really like to torment is the town blacksmith, Vakula, who creates paintings of the devil being vanquished. Vakula is in love with Oksana, but she will have nothing to do with him. Vakula, however, is determined to win her over, even if it means battling the devil. Taken from Nikolai Gogol’s first successful work, the story collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, The Night Before Christmas is available here for the first time as a stand-alone novella and is a perfect introduction to the great Russian satirist.
Download or read book Shantytown written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 policeman who would use anyone including innocent kids to break a drug ring he believes is operating in the slum. By the author of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.
Download or read book The Musical Brain And Other Stories written by César Aira and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of micro-fiction. 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.
Download or read book Because She Never Asked New Directions Pearls written by Enrique Vila-Matas and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novella—half joke and half nightmare— by "Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure" (The New Yorker) Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she’s in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse. “Something strange happened along the way,” Vila-Matas wrote. “Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked, the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction.”
