Ghosts

by César Aira, Chris Andrews (Translator)

Overview

The most unsettling and stunning of Aira's short novels published by New Directions.
"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 GhostsGhosts 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811217422
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/24/2009
Series:	New Directions Paperbook
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	277,311
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Nominated for a Neustadt award and the Man Booker International Prize, César Aira was born in Coronel
Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. He has published at least eighty books and was most recently the creator and curator of a limited edition art piece, “The Valise,” for the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

The poet Chris Andrewsteaches at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. He has translated books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions.

Editorial Reviews

Ghosts has some serious bite, for such a little book. Within it Aira likens literature to a building that has never been built, to an architect's dream. And though he never comes out and says it, I get the sense that for him the reader is always a ghost, haunting the unbuilt and the imagined, flying through time to attend to the party on the page.”

Emily Keeler - The Rumpus

Aira's literary significance, like that of many other science fiction writers, comes from how he pushes us to question the porous line between fact and fantasy, to see it not only as malleable in history, but also blurred in the everyday. The engrossing power of his work, though, comes from how he carries out these feats: with the inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after imaginary enemies in the park.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Utterly astonishing.

San Francisco Chronicle

Once you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop.

Roberto Bolaño

A languorous, surreal atmosphere of baking heat and quietly menacing shadows... puts one in mind of a painting by de Chirico.

The New Yorker

Wonderful... Ghosts is an incitement to the sensuality of thought, of wonder, of questioning, of anticipation.”

Thomas McGonigle - Los Angeles Times

Ghosts may provide the best evidence to consider the enigmatic César Aira an accomplished and prolific wizard of odd.

Marla Johnson

His imagination and intelligence are for real.

Trevor Berrett - The Mookse and the Gripes

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.

Mark Doty - Los Angeles Times

An engaging read—a weird little story.

Complete Review

How did he do it, and how did he do it so well?

Carlos Amantea - RALPH Magazine

Wonderfully strange, characteristically taut and yet irreducible… realistic people, places and behavior, and unfettered often dazzling abstraction.

Josef Braun - VUE Weekly

[The ghosts] glide into the novel, ephemerally, just as present in their absence as absent in our presence.

Jesse Tangen-Mills - Bookslut

His imagination and intelligence are for real.”— Trevor Berrett

The Mookse and the Gripes

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.”— Mark Doty

Los Angeles Times

How did he do it, and how did he do it so well?”— Carlos Amantea

RALPH Magazine

Wonderfully strange, characteristically taut and yet irreducible… realistic people, places and behavior, and unfettered often dazzling abstraction.”— Josef Braun

VUE Weekly

Ghosts has some serious bite, for such a little book. Within it Aira likens literature to a building that has never been built, to an architecht's dream. And though he never comes out and says it, I get the sense that for him the reader is always a ghost, haunting the unbuilt and the imagined, flying through time to attend to the party on the page.”— Emily Keeler

The Rumpus

[The ghosts] glide into the novel, ephemerally, just as present in their absence as absent in our presence.”— Jesse Tangen-Mills

Bookslut