The Cardboard House
10 best books like The Cardboard House (Martín Adán): Chromos, The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel), Textermination: A Novel, John the Posthumous, Piano Stories, The No World Concerto, The Planets, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, A Breath of Life, Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great
| Author | Felipe Alfau |
| ISBN | 1564782042 |
Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along - Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel...
| Author | Macedonio Fernández |
| ISBN | 1934824062 |
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) is the very definition of a novel written ahead of its time. Macedonio (known to everyone by his unusual first name) worked on this novel in the 1930s and early ’40s, during the heyday of Argentine literary culture, and around the same time that At...
| Author | Christine Brooke-Rose |
| ISBN | 0811212165 |
In her latest novel, Textermination, the eminent British novelist/critic Christine Brooke-Rose pulls a wide array of characters out of the great works of literature and drops them into the middle of the San Francisco Hilton. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Captain Ahab, Odysseus, Huck Finn... all...
| Author | Jason Schwartz |
| ISBN | 1939293219 |
John the Posthumous exists in between fiction and poetry, elegy and history: a kind of novella in objects, it is an anatomy of marriage and adultery, an interlocking set of fictional histories, and the staccato telling of a murder, perhaps two murders. This is a literary album of a pre-Internet world,...
| Author | Felisberto Hernández |
| ISBN | 0941419541 |
Inhabited by rich, eccentric characters and full of strange and surprising landscapes, this collection of short stories deeply influenced a generation of magical realists.If I hadn't read the stories of Felisberto Hernandez in 1950, I would not be the writer I am today. Because he taught me that the...
Hailed by Spain's Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño's 2666, Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co., and Marías's Your Face Tomorrow, The No World Concerto is a many-layered puzzle concerning an old screenwriter who has holed up in a shabby hotel...
| Author | Sergio Chejfec |
| ISBN | 1934824399 |
Both of Chejfec's books that have been translated into English (The Planets and My Two Worlds) have proven themselves somewhat difficult to get through. Not because Chejfec is a difficult writer per se, nor because I find them exhausting, but there is resistance in his prose that I liken to someone inviting...
| Author | César Aira |
| ISBN | 0811219992 |
César Aira's newest novel in English is not about a conventional doctor. Single, in his forties, and poor, Dr. Aira is a skeptic. His personality his weaknesses, whims, and pet peeves is summed up in a series of digressions and regressions but he has a very special gift for miracles. He no longer cares...
| Author | Clarice Lispector |
| ISBN | 0811219623 |
A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published.
At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured”...
| Author | Nicanor Parra |
| ISBN | 0811215970 |
"Real seriousness," Nicanor Parra, the antipoet of Chile, has said, rests in "the comic." And read in that light, this newest collection of his work is very serious indeed. It is an abundant offering of his signature mocking humor, subverting received conventions, and pretensions in both poetry and...
| Author | Roberto Bolaño |
| ISBN | 0811219283 |
A deluxe edition of Bolaño's collected poetry
Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolaño touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which "you become infinitely small without disappearing." When asked, "What makes you believe you're...
| Author | Leopoldo Marechal |
| ISBN | 9507313796 |
A modernist urban novel in the tradition of James Joyce, Adam Buenosayres is a tour-de-force that does for Buenos Aires what Carlos Fuentes did for Mexico City or José Lezama Lima did for Havana - chronicles a city teeming with life in all its clever and crass, rude and intelligent forms. Employing a...
| Author | Horacio Castellanos Moya |
| ISBN | 0811218465 |
Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling...
| Author | Rodrigo Rey Rosa |
| ISBN | 0300196105 |
In the vein of the writings of Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux, and V. S. Naipaul, The African Shore marks a major new installment in the genre of dystopic travel fiction. Rodrigo Rey Rosa, prominent in today’s Guatemalan literary world and an author of growing international reputation, presents a tale...
Dark Times Filled with Light
| Author | Juan Gelman |
| ISBN | 1934824682 |
As Juan Gelman’s name begins appearing with regularity on lists predicting Nobel-Laureate-deserving poets, his work has also begun to appear in English. But only now are the most stunning translations of Gelman’s poetry being published, and in one substantial volume. Dark Times Filled with...
