Hades, Argentina

Hades, Argentina
Author: Daniel Loedel
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593188659

VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD FINALIST CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLIST “A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” —Seattle Times A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love. In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both? It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.

Savage Theories

Savage Theories
Author: Pola Oloixarac
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616957352

A student at the Buenos Aires School of Philosophy attempts to put her life (academically and romantically) in the service of a professor whose nearly forgotten theories of violence she plans to popularise and radicalise - against his wishes. Meanwhile, a young couple - a documentary filmmaker and a blogger - engage in a series of cerebral and sexual misadventures. In a novel crammed with philosophy, group sex, revolutionary politics and a fighting fish named Yorick, Oloixarac leads her characters and the reader through dazzling and digressive intellectual byways.

The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau

The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau
Author: Graeme Macrae Burnet
Publisher: Saraband
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1913393585

By a Booker Prize nominee and an internationally bestselling author: a captivating homage to Georges Simenon, an absorbing character study and a highly original detective story. Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adèle Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis. But one day, she simply vanishes into thin air. When Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate the girl’s disappearance, Manfred’s repressed world is shaken to its core and he is forced to confront the dark secrets of his past. The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau is a literary mystery novel that is, at heart, an engrossing psychological portrayal of an outsider pushed to the limit by his own feverish imagination.

Departing at Dawn

Departing at Dawn
Author: Gloria Lisé
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2009-05-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1558616470

“[A] quiet, powerful novel” of a young woman caught in the chaos of Argentina in the mid-1970s, when speaking against the government could mean death (Publishers Weekly). March 23, 1976. Berta watches horrified as her lover, a union organizer named Atilio, is thrown from a window to his death by soldiers. The next day, Colonel Jorge Rafael Videla stages a coup d’état and a military dictatorship takes control of Argentina. And even though she was never a part of Atilio’s union efforts, Berta is on a list to be “disappeared.” Fleeing to relatives in the countryside, she becomes part of the family she knows only from old photographs: Aunt Avelina, who blasts music from an old record player; Uncle Nepomuceno, who watches slugs slither in the garden every afternoon; and Uncle Javier, who sits in his tiny grocery store day and night. But soon enough, Berta realizes she must run even further to save her life—and those she has come to love. With a prose that is light yet penetrating, Gloria Lisé has written “a beautifully simple, poetic story of solidarity and love, with memorable characters painted in the tender strokes of a watercolor” (Luisa Valenzuela, author of Black Novel with Argentines).

The Desert and Its Seed

The Desert and Its Seed
Author: Jorge Barón Biza
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 081122581X

An undiscovered modern Argentinian classic, based on the tragic lives of the renowned Raúl Barón Biza (a wealthy politician and notorious writer) and his wife Rosa Clotilde Sabattini The Desert and Its Seed opens with a taxi ride to the hospital: Eligia’s face is disintegrating from acid thrown by her ex-husband while they signed divorce papers. Mario, her son, tries to wipe the acid from Eligia’s face, but his own fingers burn. What follows is a fruitless attempt to reconstruct Eligia’s face—first in Buenos Aires, thereafter in Milan. Mario, the narrator, becomes the shadow and witness of the reconstruction attempts to repair his mother’s outraged flesh. In this role, he must confront his own terrible existence and identity, both of which are bound to an Argentina he sees disintegrating around him. Based on a true, tragic family story, Jorge Barón Biza’s The Desert and Its Seed was rejected by publishers in Buenos Aires and was finally self-published in 1998, three years before the author committed suicide. Written in a captivating plain style with dark, bitter humor, The Desert and Its Seed has become a modern classic, published to enormous acclaim throughout the Spanish-speaking world and translated into many languages.

Imagining Argentina

Imagining Argentina
Author: Lawrence Thornton
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1991-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0553345796

“Remarkable . . . deeply inventive . . . Thorton has imagined Argentina truly; his inspired fable troubles and feeds our own intriguing imagining.”—Los Angeles Times Imagining Argentina is set in the dark days of the late 1970's, when thousands of Argentineans disappeared without a trace into the general's prison cells and torture chambers. When Carlos Ruweda's wife is suddenly taken from him, he discovers a magical gift: In waking dreams, he had clear visions of the fates of “the disappeared.” But he cannot “imagine” what has happened to his own wife. Driven to near madness, his mind cannot be taken away: imagination, stories, and the mystical secrets of the human spirit. Praise for Imagining Argentina “A harrowing, brilliant novel.”—The New Yorker “A powerful new novel . . . Thorton seems to have wedded his study of such writers as Borges and Marquez with thy his own instinctive gift for metaphor, and in doing so, created his own brand of magical realism”—The New York Times “Imagining Argentina is a slim volume filled with beautiful writing. It is an exciting adventure story. It is a haunting love story. And it is a story for all time.”—Detroit Free Press “The writing is crystalline, the metaphors compelling . . . Its central theme is universal.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “In a time when much North American fiction is contained by crabbed realism, Thorton takes for his material one of the bleaker recent instances of human cruelty, sees in it the enduring nobility of the human spirit and imagines a book that celebrates that spirit.”—The Washington Post Book World “A powerful first novel and a manifesto for the memorializing power of literature.”—The New York Times Book Review “A profoundly hopeful book.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Science Fiction in Argentina

Science Fiction in Argentina
Author: Joanna Page
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2016-03-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0472053108

This book examines an unprecedented range of science fiction texts-including literature, cinema, theater, and comics-produced in Argentina from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. These works address themes common to the genre across the industrialized world, including techno-authoritarianism, new modes of posthuman subjectivity, and apocalyptic visions of environmental catastrophe. At the same time, Argentine science fiction is fully grounded in the social and political life of the nation. The texts discussed here explore the impact of an uneven modernization, mass migration, dictatorships, crises in national identity, the rise and fall of the Left, the question of Argentina's indigenous heritage, the impact of neoliberalism, and the most recent economic crisis of 2001. Argentine science fiction is also highly reflexive, debating within its pages the role of science fiction and fantasy in the society of its day, and the nature of the text in a world of advancing technology. This book makes important contributions to our understanding of science fiction as a genre, as well as to materialist theories of cultural texts. It will also interest students and scholars researching the culture, history, and politics of Argentina and Latin America. Book jacket.

Tango

Tango
Author: Robert Farris Thompson
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2006-12-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1400095794

In this generously illustrated book, world-renowned Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson gives us the definitive account of tango, "the fabulous dance of the past hundred years–and the most beautiful, in the opinion of Martha Graham.” Thompson traces tango’s evolution in the nineteenth century under European, Andalusian-Gaucho, and African influences through its representations by Hollywood and dramatizations in dance halls throughout the world. He shows us tango not only as brilliant choreography but also as text, music, art, and philosophy of life. Passionately argued and unparalleled in its research, its synthesis, and its depth of understanding, Tango: The Art History of Love is a monumental achievement.

Optic Nerve

Optic Nerve
Author: Maria Gainza
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1948226170

"In this delightful autofiction―the first book by Gainza, an Argentine art critic, to appear in English―a woman delivers pithy assessments of world–class painters along with glimpses of her life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole." ―The New York Times Book Review, Notable Book of the Year and Editors' Choice The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko’s refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator’s husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault’s workshop; Gustave Courbet’s devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau’s honor . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator’s life in Buenos Aires―her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies. Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve marks the English–language debut of a major Argentinian writer. It is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.

Patients of the State

Patients of the State
Author: Javier Auyero
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2012-05-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0822352338

Describes the power that can be imposed, and the misery that is caused, especially for the poor, by the simple act of waiting. This title also describes a variety of different situations, including waiting for national identity cards, for welfare agencies, and the endless waiting for relocation from the slums.