Agencia Literaria CBQ 2014/2015 Adults Fiction Catalogue

Catalogue 2014/2015

Selva Almada

Argentina, 1973 She is the author of several poetry books and anthologies of short stories. Her first novel, El viento que arrasa, has had excellent reviews and has been praised by the media. It has been selected as one of the best books published in 2012.

It includes several compilations of short stories, among them Die Nacht des Kometen (Alemania, 2012); De puntín (Mondadori, 2008); Poetas argentinas 19611980 (Ediciones Del Dock, 2007); Narradores del siglo XXI (Opción Libros, GCBA, 2006);Una terraza propia.

Nuevas narradoras argentinas (Norma, 2006).

Since 2006 she is a co-director of the series of lectures “Carne Argentina” at FM La Tribu. She coordinates creative writing workshops in Buenos Aires and other places in Argentina.

“Selva Almada moves about on a map of fiction: this is not urban literature, it is not literature about young people, nor about outsiders, nor about people who spend their time sniffing coke. It is literature of the provinces like that of Carson McCullers, for example. Regional in contrast with global cultures but not a fiction of manners. Just the opposite of much urban fiction, which is literature of manners without being regional” Beatriz Sarlo, Diario Perfil “Selva Almada’s prose has a touch of the Faulkner of While I lay dying, but put through (and somewhat softened by) the filters of the earthy light of the cotton fields (those of the south of that South) and the clean clothes worn by country people to Sunday mass.” Germán Machado "Selva Almada reinvents the imaginative rural world of a country (...) She is an author gifted with very uncommon power and sensitivity". Rolling Stone Magazine “Original and full of novelty, Selva Almada has seduced with a style which is both poetic and realistic. Her literature raises your hair without reaching the full sting of horror.” Cristián Alarcón suplemento Babelia, El País "Colloquial expression, the popular speech of the region where her stories unfold live side by side with a literary language of enormous elegance and precision.” Soledad Platero, El País, Uruguay.

“What seems fantastical soon turns hyperrealistic, a bit like in the stories of Rulfo or Sara Gallardo.” Oliverio Coelho, La Nación, Argentina.

"In her realism of magical repercussions, Onetti and the Borges of El Sur come together with the inflamed shadow of Horacio Quiroga, but the quality and resolve of her prose produce a power of suggestion that is unique to Selva Almada.” Francisco Solano, El País, España

Works Chicas muertas. Chronicle, 2014.

Ladrilleros (Brickmakers) Novel, 2013 El viento que arrasa. Novel, 2012 Una chica de provincia. Short stories 2007 Niños. Short stories, 2005 Mal de muñecas. Poems, 2003

Ladrilleros (Brickmakers)

NOVEL

Novel. Mardulce editora, 2013 Pájaro Tamai and Marciano Miranda, two twentyyear-olds, are dying in a deserted amusement park.

The story begins almost at its end, just a little after the two main characters have faced off in a knife fight, the culmination of an enmity that has pitted them against one another since childhood having been bequeathed to them by their fathers, and just a little before their impending deaths.

The present in Ladrilleros is a state of impending death, at moments marked by hallucinations: Marciano is visited by the ghost of his father, who was murdered when he was an adolescent, a father he had sworn to avenge,in a promise he could not keep; Pájaro is also visited, as in a returning nightmare, by his abusive father who disappeared years earlier.

Interspersed among the hallucinantions, which are narrated by an omniscient narrator but from the point of view of each character, a device causes narrator and character to blur, to merge constantly, flashbacks tell the story of the two families, the Tamais and the Mirandas, a story of latent rancor. Of this rancor as well as of tragedy is born a love between Pájaro and Ángel, the youngest of the Mirandas: a love that saves and damns, which revives the hatred and which, inexorably, leads to death.

A sort of homosexual Romeo and Juliet, Ladrilleros is set in a hostile environment, full of tough, fight-prone, drunken men; of lonely children who grow up any way they can; of passionate, violent, sexual loves; of merciless suns that dry up everything they touch.

“Ladrilleros is a more adult book, more literary, more direct than the previous ones.”

Quintín, Perfil

"Selva Almada provides in these pages a solid text, brilliant, with a rich vocabulary and a big flight." El Cultural, Spain "Selva Almada reconstructs the experience of a provincial town with extreme accuracy, discovers its rules and recreates its language searching not only for the sonority of the words but also for the complexity of their senses.” Martín Lojo, La Nación “Ladrilleros: every sentence is a threat; every paragraph, a blow.” Miriam Molero´ “Ladrilleros keeps the tension until the end through a simple story with complex characters who are attractive and full of nuances” Suplemento las 12, Página 12

“Where does the detachment that makes an author original, novel and lucid, even when she wanders through waters visited before by classical writers such as Onetti, Juan José Saer or the writers from the American South, come from? In Almada, one discovers after reading her without breathing and without knowing her, you find the Onetti who wrote El Astillero y Juntacadáveres, but also the Faulkner of As I lay dying and Sanctuary”. Cristián Alarcón suplemento Babelia, El País "Colloquial expression, the popular speech of the region where her stories unfold live side by side with a literary language of enormous elegance and precision.” Soledad Platero, El País, Uruguay.

“What seems fantastical soon turns hyperrealistic, a bit like in the stories of Rulfo or Sara Gallardo.” Oliverio Coelho, La Nación, Argentina.

“Alamada reconstructs the experience of a town in the provinces with extreme precision; she discovers its rules and recreates its language by not only looking for the sonority of its words but also the complexity of their meanings.” Martín Lojo, ADN, Argentina.

In her realism of magical repercussions, Onetti and the Borges of El Sur come together with the inflamed shadow of Horacio Quiroga, but the quality and resolve of her prose produce a power of suggestion that is unique to Selva Almada.” Francisco Solano, El País, España

“Almada examinates a cracked territory, at the south of Juan Rulfo and Faulkner, and she decides to do it with a dry prose, few stylistic flourishes and a neutral tone, almost a non-tone. The fiction, her story is too savage.” Alberto Gordo. El Cultural

“A solid story, wonderfully told, that plays skillfully with the best traces of the best names in literature.” Juan Laborda Barceló . La tormenta en un vaso, Blog

*The novel’s title alludes to the protagonists’ trade: making bricks in a traditional manner is a fairly common job among the working classes of northeastern Argentina, the setting of the story.

Published by: Argentina Mardulce Editora/España Lumen, Penguin Random House/ Holanda Meulenhoff/Francia Editions Métailié

Chicas muertas

CHRONICLE

Chronicle. Penguin Random House, 2014

"Three small-town teenage girls murdered in the 1980’s, three unpunished deaths that occurred before the word femicide was coined.”

Three murders among hundreds that do not make the front page or draw the cameras of the Buenos Aires TV channels.

Three cases that come in disorderly manner: they are announced on the radio, they are commemorated in a small-town paper, someone recalls them in a conversation. The crimes that took in Argentina outside the great cities while the country was celebrating the return of democracy.

Three deaths with no guilty parties.

Having become an obsession over the years, these cases give rise to an atypical, fruitless investigation. Selva Almada’s clean prose captures the invisible, and the everyday forms of violence against girls and women come to make up one intense, vivid plot. With this book the author blazes new trails in Latin American non-fiction.

"Lots of her stories contain some of the charm that the family times after dinner have, when the elder sisters and parents start telling forbidden stories, tragic tales that happen at night, at the time when the devil goes out to recruit his people. Almada learnt from these tales, recorded those voices and now is the instrument through which those invisibles beings talk. That is not something that a workshop give, it’s a gift." Fabián Casas

"Far from the detective story, this is an intimate tale, a certain negative of the autobiography of a young woman looking at other young women and how all of them are perceived by a society where misogyny and violence against them is still an everyday affair”. Página 12 “The ever latent tensión between the reality and the literature feeds this work which can be perceived as one of the greatest contributions to non-fiction in the recent past”. Ideas de izquierda.org

“Chicas muertas is also a novel about absences, which are deprived of forgiveness the moment these stories touched her”. Radar Libros "Almada changes the genre and throws herself into the mixed waters of non-fiction… to succeed once again!” . Vuelo Digital “Chicas muertas deserves an intense reading not only due to the superior quality of the literary text but also because it invites to a reflection about femicide and the place of women in justice and in society”. Diario registrado "Almada has been able to consolidate herself as a non-fiction narrator who, with an intense and precise language, does research in the different tipes of violence against women”. Revista Cabal

Published by: Spanish Penguin Random House/Francia Editions Métailié

María Rosa Lojo

Argentina 1954 She holds a doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires and is the Head Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research. (CONICET) Praised for her polyphony and variety of registers, she has devoted her studies to Argentine literature, delving into issues of gender, the construction of national inventories of images, the links among history, fiction and self-fiction.

Translated into several languages, her work has been the subject of books, doctoral theses and over a hundred academic papers in Argentina and abroad.

She has received numerous prizes and awards, the most noteworthy of which are: the Fondo Nacional de las Artes’ prize for the short story (1986) and its prize for the novel (1987); the Eduardo Mallea First Prize of the City of Buenos Aires for La pasión de los nómades (1996); the Kónex Prize for Literature (the decade 1993-2004); Esteban Echeverría National Prize, for the whole of her narrative work (2004). She was also awarded the Silver Medal of Merit by the Legislature of the Province of Buenos Aires (2002); the Hispanicity Medal (2009) and the Bicentenary Medal by the City of Buenos Aires (2010).

She contributes to ADN Cultura, La Nación’s literary supplement; Revista Ñ, that of Clarín; Radar Libros, that of Página/12.

“…her fictions mark her as a writer in the first line.” Ernesto Sábato “María Rosa Lojo’s book are full of luxury, poetry In them she constantly moves from a liberated reality to a deep reality". Enrique Molina “Today, in Argentina, there is no one who writes more polished, expressive prose”.

Enrique Anderson Imbert “María Rosa Lojo has been able to combine intensive academic activity with an outstanding narrative oeuvre which situates her among our country’s best-known writers”. Revista Ñ, Clarín

“One of the most original, most convincing voices in present-day Spanish American literature”. Corriere della Sera The author’s webpage: www.mariarosalojo.com.ar Works Narrative Árbol de Familia. Novel, 2010 Finisterre. Novel, 2005 Las Libres del Sur. Novel, 2004 Amores insólitos de nuestra historia. Stories, 2001 Historias ocultas en la Recoleta. Stories, 2000 Una mujer de fin de siglo. Novel, 1999 La princesa federal. Novel, 1998 La pasión de los nómades. Novel,1994. “Eduardo Mallea” First Prize of the City of Buenos Aires Canción perdida en Buenos Aires al Oeste. Novel, 1987. Fondo Nacional de las Artes Prize for the Novel Marginales. Stories, 1986. Fondo Nacional de las Artes Prize for the Story

Essay Identidad y narración en carne viva. Cuerpo, género y espacio en la novela argentina (1980-2010). María Rosa Lojo and Michèle Soriano (eds.)

Los ‘gallegos’ en el imaginario argentino (with Marina Guidotti and Ruy Farías) ,2008.

Sábato: en busca del original perdido, 1997 El símbolo: poéticas, teorías, metatextos, 1997 Cuentistas argentinos de fin de siglo, 1997 La ‘barbarie’ en la narrativa argentina, 1994 Prose Poem/ Microfiction/Short fiction Bosque de ojos, 2011 Libro das Seniguáis e do único Senigual, 2010. With photos by Leonor Beuter Esperan la mañana verde, 1998 Forma oculta del mundo, 1991 Visiones, 1984 Forma oculta del mundo, 1991. Alfredo Roggiano First Prize. Second Prize for Poetry of the City of Buenos Aires.

Visiones, 1984. First Prize for Poetry of the Buenos Aires Book Fair for unpublished authors. Third Prize for Poetry of the City Buenos Aires.

Todos éramos hijos

NOVEL

Novel Sudamericana. Penguin Random House, 2014.

247 pages It’s the beginning of the seventies and Frik spends her last months in college. Not long before, someone has given her the odd nickname which has become almost unanimously popular amongst her peers at the drama class in the catholic school she attends. These are years of turmoil in Argentina, Liberation Theology and Third World Church cross the school’s walls and take root in those youngsters in the midst of their existential search. Meanwhile, the Montoneros organization makes its social appearance and the country is headed towards democracy with the 1973 elections and Perón’s victory.

The dictatorship is embedded in this generation’s AND who has no opportunity for rehearsal because the seventies’ violence doesn’t speculate and, in the merest hint of action, they risk their lives. As their personalities grow, their destiny is forged.

The novel reveals the backstage of an era, its spirit seen through the eyes of a handful of students that forge their personalities and define their destinies.

Todos éramos hijos opens a barely explored perspective in Argentine fiction for it gives witness to those years as seen from an almost virginal setting: the view of the very young and their militant commitment. It also dives into the eternal conflict between parents and children. María Rosa Lojo involves us in a story both intimate and social, with a bold and perceptive novel about a still burning past.

“ María Rosa Lojo reflects a period of upheaval in which a fraction of the Church wakes up and takes a commitment alongside the poor in a country subjected to social violence, to a fight against hunger, to poverty…” Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

“Frik, a shy teenager, in love with silence, sees how everything, except her family, changes in the seventies. Nuns and priests not only change their habits, they teach a gospel where the poor demand commitment from the boys and girls, so much so that some of them choose sacrifice. This book is a must for the understanding of that period.” Graciela Fernández Meijide

“María Rosa Lojo feels the need to tell the story of her generation, and looks for alternatives. She finds it in the theatre, in a correspondence with Arthur Miller’s ‘Listen my children’. In the center of the scene, in the role that each of the chosen teenagers – students from two different catholic schools—will play on stage lies the challenge to the father figure, to that which is given, to inheritance. There’s a permanent bond with the seventies’ political struggle that the author summarizes in one line: they questioned their biological father, and they were betrayed by the political father they chose” Gustavo Garcia, La Prensa.

Published by: Spanish: Sudamericana Argentina

For other countries available

Árbol de Familia

NOVEL

Editorial Sudamericana, 2010, Debolsillo, 2012. 287 pages The family is the great protagonist of this novel in which fascinating stories intertwine like the leaves of a single foliage. Two main branches, the maternal and paternal, reflect different social contexts and even different sides in politics, the fragmented story of the Spanish diaspora, the narrative of emigration beginning in the late 19th Century and also the exile that followed the Civil War. On one side and the other, there are intriguing characters and incredible lives: Maruja, the Bewitched; Domingos, the madman; Antón, the red; Rafaeliño, the bigamist; the beautiful Doña Ana; Fito, the pyromaniac, none the less universal for being unique. All the branches converge in a point in the present: the narrative voice of the daughter born in America.

While harldly saying anything about herself, María Rosa Lojo, in Árbol de familia, carves out her own Spanish and Argentine identity, with a language of an intense, poetic vibration capable of subtly integrating irony, humour and compassion. In this way she draws the reader into a blend of surprising plots whose all too human characters he or she will not likely ever forget.

“Relatives separated by an ocean overcome distances and chronologies to appear vividly in stories of poetic sonority and constant seductiveness”. Silvia Plager, Revista Ñ “The poetic voice takes on the task of making this personal process into a sum of emotions that the reader can easily experience as his own”. ADN, La Nación “The characters, rich in shadings, are constructed with an acute instinct for observation and psychological depth". Radar, Página 12 “An emotive, moving novel”…The fluidity of the narrative and the particular interest of each character makes this novel one of those unforgettable books that are left on the night table to be read over and over”. Andrés Cáceres, Los Andes, Mendoza “A dazzling novel”. Marian Scotti, Diario La Capital “This is, without a doubt, one of the author’s best books. Certainly the most mature and reflective”. Horacio Semeraro La Gaceta

Published by: Argentina Editorial Sudamericana

Finisterre

NOVEL

Finisterre . Novel. Sudamericana, 2005. De Bolsillo 2011 247 pages London, the winter of 1874: the young Elizabeth Armstrong, the only child of a widowed, well-to-do businessman, receives the first letter from Finisterre, the Cape at the End of the World, in Spanish Galicia. Rosalind, the writer of the letters, promises to break the silence with which Oliver Armstrong has shrouded his daughter’s birth on the River Plate.

The letters go back to forty years earlier, when the lives of Rosalind and Oliver Armstrong became one: their coach journey from Buenos Aires to Córdoba was interrupted by a band of Ranquel Indians who took them prisoner.

Rosalind relates her life as a captive in their village, her relationship with the Indians, her relationship with Armstrong amidst these savage lands. Elizabeth gradually learns of her true origins and of the great trials Rosalind had to endure during her long captivity.

These episodes alternate with Elizabeth’s life in London in a refined, upper-middle-class milieu, where she gets to know the budding writer Oscar Wilde, turns down proposals, and takes an interest in Frederick Barrymore, an employee of her father’s, likewise born on the River Plate.

Stories and characters of the two times and cultures flow together in the surprising ending of a novel, which refuses to conform to the clichés of the adventure novel or romantic anecdote and becomes a deep, existential examination of human freedom, the identity of peoples and individuals, ethnic and gender violence.

"An intelligent, polished, very well written book, that gets up the nerve to relate known facts from a perspective—that of women—until recently invisible to many”. Diario Clarín, Revista Ñ "The plasticity and impeccable precision of María Rosa Lojo’s prose, as well as her intelligent handling of dialogue, are put at the service of a captivating story, whose narrative pace never flags for a moment in the course of the entire book ". Diario La Nación "(….) Highly recommendable, very moving. Finisterre is a novel about women and identity that also questions the place of women in a patriarchal society”. Elsa Drucaroff "A complex, yet diaphanous novel that weaves stories of passion, death and blood with silk threads created by virtue of her demonstrated mastery.” La Gaceta Literaria. Diario La Gaceta "A novel that breathes the intimate, sometimes painful truth about human beings, the clashes between ethnic groups and cultures, and events decisive for our lives in common, written with the craft and literary gifts that have always distinguished María Rosa Lojo” El Arca del Nuevo Siglo.

Published by: Argentina Sudamericana /Galicia: Galaxia/ Thailand: Butterfly Book House

Ariana Harwicz

Argentina 1977 She studied filmscript writing, at the National School of Cinematographic Experimentation and Production; play writing, at the School of Dramatic Arts; and earned a first degree in Performing Arts from the University of Paris VII and a master´s degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne.

She has taught filmscript writing.

Her works, Sobre llovido, mojado and El mal está hecho have been staged. She directed the documentary El día del Ceviche, which has been shown at festivals in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela.

She contributes to the literary blog Eterna Cadencia.

Her first novel, Matate, amor has received rave reviews and was named best novel of 2012 by the Argentinian daily La Nación.

“Adriana Harwicz places all her bets on just one card—language. And wins.”

"Ariana Harwicz imposesherself as one of the great Argentinian writers. Lord and master of two powers: courage and excellence in the use of language.” Diario Clarín “Ariana Harwicz : A lawkess writing”. Valeria Tentoni Blog Eterna Cadencia "Ariana Harwicz imposesherself as one of the great Argentinian writers. Lord and master of two powers: courage and excellence in the use of language.” Diario Clarín

Words La débil mental. Novel, 2014 Tan intertextual que te desmayás. Essay, 2013 Matate, amor. Novel, 2012.

La débil mental

NOVEL

Novel . Mardulce Editora, 2014. 112 Pages Ariana Harwicz once again plunges us into the utmost recesses of family ties.

Whereas Matate, amor is the panting of a beast trapped by motherhood and marriage, La débil mental tells the story of a mother’s complex relationship with her daughter and an impossible sentimental education. A daughter who is bait, a daughter who is the object of hatred and adoration, because what is a child? wonders the mother with a little girl in her arms on a snowcovered highway.

A mother who takes her daughter to nightclubs in the area from an early age, to the wood where the trailer is, to the pissoirs. And at the same time, she teaches her to stand up straight on snails, to fix her hair, and to whistle through her fingers.

The inexhaustible sexual urge, the mother’s rivalry with her daughter, the desolation of a childhood without answers in the midst of a landscape of farms, riverbeds and inns.

The violence of a life without a man, of flight out of desperation.

La débil mental is the biography of a body where everything is buried. A novel like a well dug to the point of exhaustion, written in arid, stony words like crusts that remain intact, fixed from childhood. A mother who never learned or does not know how and sinks her teeth into the moulding as she holds her daughter over an abyss.

" Few times the relationship between a mother and a daughter has been treated in the way La débil mental does. An hypnotic narrative power." Maximiliano Tomas. La Nación "Few times the relationship between a mother and a daughter has been treated in the way La débil mental does. (...) An hypnotic narrative power." Maximiliano Tomas, La Nación “A ferocious text” .Quintín “Ariana Harwicz : A lawkess writing”. Valeria Tentoni Blog Eterna Cadencia

“Where is the limit for a mother to enquiry? How much should she show? Harwicz walks on the edge without collapsing. What happens is not madness, it is the pure unleashed truth”. Radar Libros, Página 12 "Ariana Harwicz imposesherself as one of the great Argentinian writers. Lord and master of two powers: courage and excellence in the use of language.” Diario Clarín "Ariana Harwicz is a nuclear bomb in the latest Argentinian literatura because of her feverish characters”. Silvina Friera. Página 12 “La débil mental advances with a brutal and firm rythm, with lashes on our faces”.

Bazar americano "La débil mental reminds us both to Virginia Woolf and to the dark characters of Georges Batailles”. Malena Rey "Written as a flowing conscience, it reminds us to the best modern literature –Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute- mixed with an uleashed violence that happens very seldom in Argentinian literature. La débil mental is the story of an almost animal relationship between mother and daughter, of an endless sexual drive, of the biography of a body where everything is buried”.

Published by: Argentina y América Latina : Mardulce Editora

For other countries available

Matate, amor

NOVEL

Novel. Lengua de Trapo, 2012 152 pages Matate, amor is a rural thriller. It all takes place in a house that opens out into a wood inhabited by a deer and by a family, she and he and baby makes three, though it is more two against one, namely her, who spies on them with a sharp object in her hand or an old rifle that has not spoken its last word.

The contact with savageness of the nature that surrounds the main character and the neighbours whom she stalks, but also the surge of her desire, her dark anxiety and indeed the urge to beg her husband: “kill yourself”, my love”, are the core elements in this daring, forceful, honest novel.

A woman, who far from finding peace in the bucolic life of the French countryside, comes to terms with the depression brought on by marriage and motherhood with sometimes irrational violence. “…a novel that shakes and surprises you from the first page, and relentlessly, till the end.” Malena Rey, Página 12. Argentina. “’Matate, amor’ is a sharp blow to the chest. A brutal novel.” Bruno Garrido González, Culturamas, Spain.

"This is ferocious and it’s really well written.(...) The intensity of Harwicz is astonishing."

Quintín, Perfil “’Matate, amor’ is a unique book.” Lucía Lijtmaer, Spain “One of the most perturbing works I have read lately. Highly recommended.” Layla Martínez, Spain.

“In the pages of ‘Matate, amor’ beats the pulse of a wounded anima,l of a beast lying in ambush incarnated in a wife, a mother, a lover who appears to plunge, of her own free will, into the darkest part of the forest ". Revista Quimera, Spain “The panting of a beast cornered by the pack runs through this dark, radiant story from beginning to end. These incandescent pages are an ancient cry: the bestial rescuing

the human. It is a lively, young, brash book of a savage beauty, which is read with the same labored breathing as with which it was written.” Alicia Dujovne Ortiz “The one that here speaks is a snake. A dark and viscous animal that poisons and captivates at the same time. With a classical and muddy breath (Faulkner, Woolf), the prose of this argentinian impresses because of her frenzied rythm, abrasive and incredibly violent.” Bartleby & Co . Berlín.

Published by: Spain Lengua de Trapo / Argentina Paradiso / Israel Zikit Sfarim

Giovanna Rivero

Bolivia 1972 In 1996 she was awarded the National Literary Prize of Santa Cruz for the volume of short stories Las bestias and in 2005 the National Short Story Prize Franz Tamayo for “Dueños de la arena.”

She participated in the International Writing Program offered by the University of Iowa in the Fall semester of 2004. Currently, she is getting her PhD in Spanish American Literature at the University of Florida in the United States. She also writes a biweekly column for the Bolivian newspaper El Deber.

She has published the following books of short stories: Contraluna (2005), Sangre dulce (2006), La dueña de nuestros sueños (children’s stories) (2002), and Niñas y detectives (Bartleby 2009). She has also published the novels Las camaleonas (2001), Tukzon, historias colaterales (La Hoguera 2008), and Helena 2022: La vera crónica de un naufragio en el tiempo (Puraletra 2011). Her stories can be found in various anthologies, such as El futuro no es nuestro (Eterna Cadencia 2009), Schiffe aus Feuer, compiled by Michi Strausfeld (Germany, 2010), Crónicas de oreja de vaca (Bartleby 2011), Bolivia a toda costa (El Cuervo 2011), Región, Antología del cuento político latinoamericano (Interzona 2012), and Mesías (Traviesa, 2013), translated into English as Messiah. She was selected by the Guadalajara Book Fair of 2011 as one of the writers who guarantees the continuation of the great Latin American literary production of the 20th century.

Works 98 seconds with no shadow. Novel, 2014 Niñas y detectives. Short Stories, 2009 Las Camaleonas. Novel, 2001, 2006, 2009 Tukzon, historias colaterales .Novel, 2008 Contraluna. Short Stories, 2005 Sangre dulce. Short Stories, 2006 La dueña de nuestros sueños. Short Stories, 2002, 2010

NOVEL

Noventa y ocho segundos sin sombra (98 seconds with no shadow)

Novel. Penguin Random House, 2014 Adolescence hurts, but maybe it’s the only moment in life when one is truly willing to take things to the limit without feeling an iota of guilt. We’re at the height of the 1980s, Genoveva is sixteen years old, she is a student in a high school run by nuns and she lives, in her words, in the Ass of Nowhere. Her father, perhaps the only remaining leftist in town, and her mother, a kind of provincial Madame Bovary, can scarcely deal with the arrival of a second child with Down syndrome. Genoveva decides to save precisely little Nacho and herself from not only a stifling situation, but also from an apocalypse that looms over them. Her path to salvation? The promises a Colombian Gnostic makes to her concerning a new civilization in a faraway place called Ganymede.

Contradictory, intense, shameless, and almost immoral is the first person voice with which Genoveva tells us her secrets, with the chiaroscuro of her spirituality somewhere between voodoo and the “lysergic little smile of Mary Help of Christians”, as if she herself were “the sentimental prophet” of that century’s spectacular end.

“Giovanna Rivero has pushed her imagination to the limits in terms of severity and perversion, in an unbreathable atmosphere, so as to construct a character both alive and contradictory.” Diario El Ferrol, España “…the author broaches certain taboo subjects which for not being discussed have ceased to exist and which are a scourge that Latin America has not managed to overcome. Abortion among teenagers, entrenched, systemic drug trafficking, in a society that has accepted it as just another livelihood, euthanasia, the physical and sexual abuse of minors, religious education that domesticates the ethos of femininity,

all this comes together in an invasion of small, peripheral darts that sink into the reader.” Ecdótica (blog).

“98 segundos sin sombra confirms Rivero’s narrative abilities, the fact that she continues to produce well-written texts, full of felicitous rhetorical gestures and demanding stories.” Página Siete, Bolivia "Giovanna Rivero writes good prose, able to create powerful characters and with a look that makes anxious about family creatures. 98 segundos sin sombra is her battle card and this way she has written her name in the book of the Latinoamerican literature."

Fernando Iwasaki, Revista de Libros, El Mercurio.

Published by: Spanish Penguin Random House

Lina Meruane

Chile, 1970 Is one of the most prominent female voices in Chilean contemporary narrative.

Novelist, essayist, and cultural journalist. She is the author of a host of short stories appeared in various anthologies and magazines in Spanish, English, German and French.

She has also published a collection of short stories, Las Infantas (Chile 1998, Argentina 2010), as well as three novels, Póstuma (Chile 2000, Portugal 2001), Cercada (Chile 2000) and Fruta Podrida (Chile & México 2007).

The latter won the Best Unpublished Novel Priza awarded by Chile´s National Council of the Culture and the Arts in 2006 and was a finalist for Mexico’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.

She is the winner of the Anna Seghers Prize, awarded to her by the Akademie der Künste, in Berlin, Germany, 2011.

Meruane has received writing grants from the Arts Development Fund of Chile (1997), the Guggenheim Foundation (2004) and National Endowment for the Arts (2010).

Cultural journalist, columnist and stringer for written media, she currently is the editor of Brutas Editoras, an independent publishing house located in New York City.

Holder of a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from New York University, Meruane currently teaches World and Latin American Literature and Creative Writing at New York University.

Works Contra los Hijos. Essay, 2014 Volverse Palestina. Chronicle, 2014 Viajes virales. Essay, 2012 Sangre en el ojo (Blood in the Eye) Novel, 2012 Las Infantas (The Princesses) Stories, 1998, 2010 Fruta Podrida (Rotten Fruit) Novel, 2007 Póstuma (Posthumous) Novel, 200, 2001 Cercada (Fenced-in) Novel, 2000, 2014

Contra los Hijos

ESSAY

Essay. Tumbona Ediciones, 2014 . 143 pages New and oppressive dictates rule our daily lives. Amongst them, our children’s despotism is one of the worse. From the nagging screams of La Leche League to the comeback of the cloth diapers’ comeback, including the crammed demand of the children’s agenda, the children’s empire has turned the parents into slaves and thrown women (who had recently conquered freedom) to the seclusion of childrearing. ¡Don’t give up, feminists! A writer finally reclaims the right to deny the filial industry its supplies, and warns us about a conservative ambush stalking behind the social pressures that feed today the procreation machine.

This book should be sold in drugstores side to side with condoms and the pill!

Published by: : Spanish Tumbona Ediciones For other countries available

Volverse Palestina

CHRONICLE

Chronicle . Literal Publishing. 2013. 68 pages Becoming Palestine is a chronicle that I started to write as the result of a trip I took to Beit Jala in 2012. It was from this West Bank town that my grandparents left a century ago to escape from the Ottoman Empire. It is an old story that forced me to “return” to remnants or ruins of my family history, once more or less forgotten and now pieced back together. Except that the Israeli occupation has now been added to this past of uprootedness. The trip showed me firsthand what the occupation really meant, not just in Beit Jala and in Bethlehem, where there is still a huge camp inhabited by those made refugees in 1948, but also in Hebron, surrounded by dangerous settlements, in Jerusalem, and in Tel Aviv. The deplorable situation of the Palestinians awoke a Palestinian consciousness in me, a consciousness more political than Palestinian. Still, the chronicle speaks less of this origin—an idea, that of origin, which seems quite dangerous to me when used in an essentialist manner—less of nostalgia for an origin and more of the violence of the present.”

“The contribution of Volverse Palestina is what to my mind is lacking in so many writers in the 21st Century: an intellectual commitment to those who have no voice and need a loudspeaker…” Nacho Bengoetxea

Published by: USA Literal Publishing/ México Conaculta /Chile Penguin Random House

NOVEL

Sangre en el ojo (Blood in the Eye) Novel, Eterna Cadencia, Caballo de Troya, 2012.

172 pages.

Sor Juana Award 2012 She was at a party in New York, looking into her purse under the bed for the needle that she was about to shoot up her arm when Lucine became conscious of something she had been warned that would inevitably happen. Something like an artifical fire goes through your head, but you don’t see fire. Instead, it looks like blood pouring into your eyeball, the most strikingly beautiful blood that she has ever seen, the most unheard of, the most aweful, but only she can notice it.

With a remarkable narrative skill and a specific language, Lina Meruane tells the medical itinerary of Lucina, a Chilean writer, between New York and Santiago, from the night she suffered the brain stroke until the moment she wakes up after the operation. In this trip, total blindness, uncertainty and the endless visits to her doctor, the moving into another apartment and a travel to her country of birth will untie her familiar ghosts and her most perverse wishes, pushing her relationship with Ignacio, her boyfriend, to the limit.

Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, vertiginous and caustic novel about the relation between the body and the science, the wounds and the lack of roots, the demands and unconditional love.

“A novel where not only the blood poured by the eyes is palpitating; so is good literature” Babelia, España, Rodrigo Pinto “A merciless book.” Sylvia Molloy, Chile “A powerful novel.” Federico Falcó, Argentina “Meruane’s writing is acid, so corrosive that sometimes sentences dissolve before meeting the end that they deserved.” Alvaro Enrique, El Universal, México “Writing here is developed as a powerful paw”. Elvira Navarro Revista Qué leer, España “An authentic novel written not from the edges, but from inside the sick body, with a powerful, intense narrator… who doesn’t escape from speaking the plain truth.”

Gustavo Pablos, Diario La Voz, Argentina “A small work of art.” Radio Mitre, Argentina

"Sangre en el ojo (Blood in the eye) describes, through the sight as a metaphor, a world of uncertain horizons, opposed to each other; a world which is also relentless in terms of the sentimental universe that the author builds around the main character.

Rather than as a victim, she portrays her with a final effect that reminds the reader, in a certain way, the black humour literature of the last century." Stefano Gallerani Il Manifesto, Italia Published by: Espa単a Caballo de Troya/ Argentina: Eterna Cadencia/ Chile Mondadori/ Costa Rica Editorial Lanzallamas/ Italy La Nuova Frontiera / Brasil Cosac & Naify

ESSAY

Viajes Virales (Viral Voyages, the crisis of global contagion in Aids writing)

Essay. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012.

310 pages “In this arresting book, Chilean writer and literary scholar Lina Meruane tackles an almost untouched topic in Latin American Writing: the Aids literary corpus.

Through exhaustive archival research, Meruane traces the development of “HIVPositive writing” as a response to the urgent need to provide meaning to the epidemic that spread since 1980. In a luminous preliminary essay, the author identifies the central discursive axis: travel as the instrument of contagion; homophobia as the force that pushed gays from the south towards the northern capitals; the “impressive nomadism” of the virus.

Thus Meruane´s brilliant observation: if the virus is an artifact of globality, it is also a key mechanism to represent globalization, that strictly imaginary object whose deceptive metaphor of flow reinscribes centers and peripheries. The epidemic, the viral model, appears as both the mirror and the flip-side of a new flexible and cosmopolitan capitalism.

The singularity of the Latin American experience of the epidemic is articulated here with insight and rigor: the homecomings, the challenges to the State that abandons its protective functions, the erasure of women suffering from Aids. Closer to the texts, the second part of this book establishes the chronology and the tropology of the narrative corpus, from the fleeting references in Severo Sarduy’s Colibrí (1983) to the culminating performance by Daniel Link in La Ansiedad (2004). Well known already as a great novelistic talent, Lina Meruane firmly establishes herself, with this brilliant book, in the field of cultural criticism, as a powerful, eloquent and intrepid intellect.” Mary

Louise Pratt NYU´s Silver Professor at Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature.

“This is the first study to address the powerful symbolic presence of AIDS in Latin America and the first to consider the ways in which the literary representations of AIDS enter into larger discussions of community, sexuality, nation, displacement and diaspora”. Sylvia Molloy, Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities Emerita. NYU “Lina Meruane moves freely through an archive vaster than the Library of Babel: the archive of the blood.” María Moreno, writer and cultural journalist “This book is many things at once: an extended essay, a work of literary criticism and historiography, the logbook of a journey through unexplored regions of our national literatures, and a reflection on clinical and literary discourses about AIDS. Meruane stitches together all of these elements with a nimble, fast-paced prose that establishes the framework for a reading, or, rather, for an interpretation.” Víctor Barrera Enderle, Casa de las Américas Award, Essay, México

Published by: Spanish Fondo de Cultura económica

Iosi Havilio

Argentina 1974

An acclaimed new literary voice from Argentina He studied philosophy, music and film. He writes and has two children His first novel, Opendoor made a major impression on her country’s most influential critics and he has been translated into Italian and English.

His work was included in the anthologies, Buenos Aires Escala 1:1, La joven guardia and Madrid, con perdón. In 2011 he received the fellowship granted by the National Arts Fund.

He currently coordinates writing workshops.

“Iosi Havilio is one of Latin America’s most interesting writers”. Fogwill “Iosi Havilio seizes each sentence written to domesticate literature and breaks it over her knee. In her novels we find the pure story, the strange voice, that invisible, essential work produced only by great writers”. Fabián Casas “His work is perceived as a renovation of the argentinian narrative“. Diario El País , Uruguay “One of the less than 40 years old Argentinian writers with a bigger talent and more projection of literature in Spanish.” Paco Bescós Revista Sub- Urbano

Works La serenidad. Novel, 2014 Paraísos. Novel, 2012 Estocolmo. Novel, 2010 Opendoor. Novel, 2006

NOVEL

Paraísos Novel, Mondadori, 2012. 352 pages Paraísos is the first-person telling of the story of a young woman who on being widowed and evicted from the house at Opendoor, decides to move to the capital with her little son Simón.

In the city she finds work at the zoo’s reptile house and squats at El Buti, run by drug dealers, drag queens and Tosca, a unique character.

The inexpressive young woman has a passive relationship with the world, which is disrupted by her encounters with the irreverent Eloísa, a more enigmatic than correct character with whom she shares a past and with whom she has an ambiguous relationship.

The protagonist enters into hallucinatory states with alcohol and marijuana impelled by the irrepressible personality of her friend Eloísa, who urges her to commit all sorts of excesses.

Paraísos moves from melancholy to paroxysm while deploying a whole bestiary of lonely, unfortunate characters.

“Passion and Passivity: Havilio has found just the right tone and dampened register for recounting the extreme. Paraísos transpires in an irresistible, ghostly normality”. Beatriz Sarlo “Paraísos is perhaps the author’s most satirical novel thus far, mainly on account of its capacity for combining humour and observation, but without being “sociological”, its impulse is still pure, storytelling fiction”. La voz del Interior “Paraísos is as strong as Opendoor." Diario El País, Uruguay “A good novel (both existential and social, without the burden of the obvious rhetoric and explicit intentional concessions) that leads us to life without cheating (…) You cannot write well without a lot of effort. Paraísos makes this evident.” Luis Alonso, Diario de Ferrol “Havilio believes deeply in narration and offers a novel that, like the city, invites to wander through it, makes you feel uneasy and surprises you; a well known city, real, touchable and crooked. Havilio distances himself from the universe of contemporary Argentinian literature because he narrates from a unique and personal way.” Marcela Gamberini, Tiempo Argentino Published by: Argentina Editorial Mondarori/Spain Editorial Caballo de Troya /English And Other Stories Publishing/

Opendoor

NOVEL

Novel. Editorial Entropía, 2006. 204 Pages Movement between city and country is this novel’s driving force.

The main character is a young veterinary student, whose at once indolent and defenseless discourse weaves a soberly developed, exquisitely resolved plot.

In the first pages the narrator, who never reveals her name, introduces herself as the employee of a veterinarian who lives with another woman, Ada, who a short time later disappears in a mysterious fashion.

In order to diagnose a horse’s illness, the protagonist arrives at a field close to the Opendoor psychiatric settlement. There she meets Jaime, an almost old country dweller, and without thinking about it or wanting it, she starts a relationship with him. Opendoor is to become a place of belonging, where she mitigates her lack of ties and absence of her girlfriend.

Opendoor grows in the context of a plot where the contours of the past and future are veiled in favor of a present marked by the clash between the strange and the natural.

Writing which skilfully manoeuvres among restrained acid wit and tenderness, realism and abstraction, precision of description and solidity in narrative.

“This novel is something that surprised me. It does not adhere to any system of reading. It seems to appear from nothing”. Beatriz Sarlo.

“Iosi Havilio’s remarkable first novel brings news of an intriguing world”. Martin Schifino, The Independent “An ambiguous tale that verges on dark comedy … With skill and subtlety, the novel hints that a whole society might labour under an illusion of liberty”. The Economist “Havilio seems to look for a place where one can write without imitating anyone— though like Opendoor the place may be depopulated and unstable”. Quintín “Living, say some, is much easier than thinking life. This would seem to be the motto that almost unconsciously guides the steps of the main character in Opendoor, Iosi Havilio’s debut work. A novel which, in its sober construction, its restrained style reveals the hand of mature, balanced writing”. Revista Ñ “The success of the project is reflected in the verosimilitude of the narrative voice”.

Jordi Carrión. Diario ABC

“Havilio documents the void and narrates it efficiently and whoever reads her knows the despair of the days and the observing gaze of the protagonist.… Opendoor is a novel of solitary songs, of intimate codes and contains a story one ponders and does not forget”. Babelia, El País “Iosi Havilio’s Open Door is a strange, elliptical little novel written in a plainspoken prose that belies its haunting core.” Enmma Pages inter at shelf Awareness.

“Iosi Havilio’s remarkable first novel brings news of an intriguing world”. Martin Schifino, The Independent “An ambiguous tale that verges on dark comedy … With skill and subtlety, the novel hints that a whole society might labour under an illusion of liberty”. The Economist

Published by: Argentina Editorial Entropía/ Spain Editorial Caballo de Troya /Italy Caravan Edizioni/ England And Other Stories Publishing/

Mario Levrero Uruguay 1940-2004 Jorge Mario Varlotta Levrero, born in Montevideo in 1940 and died there in 2004.

Levrero was a photographer, bookseller comics script writer, humorist, crossword author, creator of brain games. In his later years, he directed a literary workshop.

A cult writer, later in life he was seen as a master and point of reference for many of the best writers in Latin America.

Levrero’s writing, structured around humour and unease, takes the form of a clean prose based on the psychological that has been characterized as “introspective realism”.

He is the author of an extensive body of literary work which includes journalistic writing (some of the best articles are to be found in Irrupciones I and Irrupciones II), short stories, novels and essays.

Levrero hated interviews and prologues. He was interested in self-hypnosis, believed in telepathic phenomena, read about Zen, was addicted to computers, loved science, hated being addressed in the “usted” form, could not abide solemnity in general, read detective novels even at breakfast. He was a lover of cinema.

“Levrero is Kafka’s “everyday” flip side, a shadow of Camus with a comical take”. El País.

“Style and imagination like Levrero’s are rare in Spanish-language literature”. Antonio Muñoz Molina “Mario Levrero is a genius”. Enrique Fogwil “Levrero is an author who challenges the canonical idea of Latin American literature. If you really want to complete the puzzle of our tradition, you must read him.“Granta Magazine

Works Novels Diario de un canalla y Burdeos, 1972 (Diary of a swine and Bordeaux, 1972 ), 2013

Caza de conejos (The rabbit hunt), 1986, 2012 La novela luminosa (The luminous novel), 2005 El discurso vacío (Empty talk), 1996 El alma de Gardel, 1996, 2012 Dejen todo en mis manos (Leave it all up to me), 1996

La banda del ciempiés (The centipede gang), 1989 Fauna, 1987 Desplazamientos, 1987 El lugar (The Place), 1982 París (París), 1980 Nick Carter… (Nick Carter has a good time while the reader is murdered and I lie dying), 1975 La ciudad (The City), 1970 Stories Caza de conejos (The rabit hunt), 2012 Los carros de fuego, 2003 Ya que estamos, 2001 El portero y el otro, 1992 Espacios libres, 1987 Los muertos, 1986 Aguas salobres, 1983 Todo el tiempo, 1982 La máquina de pensar en Gladys, 19700 Newspaper Articles Irrupciones I, 2001 Irrupciones II ,2001

La novela luminosa (The luminous novel)

NOVEL

Novel Alfaguara, 2004; Mondadori, 2008. 567 pages.

In this posthumously published work, Mario Levrero took up the task of writing a novel in which he could narrate certain extraordinary experiences that he called “luminous”. An impossible task, as he later admitted, but one on which he embarks in “Diary of the grant”. (Levrero wrote this novel after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship.)

In each of the entries in this diary which covers a year of his life, the author tells us about himself, his quirks, his agoraphobia, his sleep disorders, his computer addictions, his hypochondria and the meaning of his dreams. A separate chapter is dedicated to women, particularly Chl, who feeds him and takes him on the few walks he takes around Montevideo in search of books by Rosa Chacel and the detective novels he reads obsessively.

The fear of death, love, the loss of love, death, old age, poetry, and the nature of fiction, the luminous, inexpressible experiences: there is room for all of it in this monumental work.

“An incontrovertible figure in the new literature of Latin America”. El País “A masterpiece” Damián Tabarovsky, El País “The unique style of an author who redefines the notion of the autobiography.” Fogwill “One of the most important novels in Latin American literature in recent years”. Letras Libres “From beginning to end, we are dealing with a challenging voyage through the lucid head of a great writer”. Letras Libres “La novela luminosa” is a updated versión of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities”. Revista Universidad Diego Portales “Cult book”, Fogwill “….porous book which absorbs elements of the diary, the chronicle, the essay, auteur literary criticism…The book which establishes Levrero as one of the most profound, most mature writers in Hispano-American literature of recent decades.” Víctor Coral

Published world-wide in Spanish by Mondadori/Portuguese Editora Rocco/ Italian Jaca Book Edizioni.

For other countries available

NOVEL

La banda de CiempiĂŠs (The centipede gang)

Novel Random House Mondadori, Argentina 2010. 190 pages A terrorific gigantic worm formed by fifty men covered by a cloth wreaks terror in the city and forces private detective Carmody Trailler into action. Smithe Andrews, the police chief, suspects that this dangerous band of criminals is of Chinese background and orders a raid that leads to a series of diplomatic incidents, kidnappings, conspiracies, chases, acts of vengeance and international reprisals.

This is merely the opening of The Centipede Gang, a wild adventure movie which masterfully combines genres, humour, digressions and detours to create a dizzying universe where Mario Levrero once again finds a dazzling, unexpected way out. . “A very entertaining piece of pulp fiction�. Elvio Gandolfo

Published in Spanish world-wide by Random House Mondadori.

For other countries available

ILUSTRATED BOOK

Caza de conejos (The rabbit hunt) Collection of thematically related short stories Editorial Zorro Rojo, 2012. 166 pages.

Illustrated book. Illustrations by Sonia Pulido A feverish rabbit hunt full of the most unlikely traps and bait. Bears disguised as rabbits or babies in wicker baskets that work well as rabbit lures. A well-organized expedition led by the idiot, who imagines erotic rabbits to masturbate as he drools.

Laura, who hunts naked and traps rabbits between her legs. Evaristo, the plumber, who is disappointed when he catches empty rabbits with no clockwork inside.

Rabbits disguised as forest rangers, who love Schubert, and the den Águeda provides for them. “She is almost always lying on the carpet with her legs slightly open. One can sit at a prudent distance and if one is patient and makes no noise, one will in time observe a white, nervous little head pop out to take a look”.

A work that “could be the rabbits’ trap made of words designed to finally catch people”.

“The person who starts reading him will become irresistibley trapped by the magic of a literature full of mistery and humour “. Diario La Nación, Argentina “Rivers of imagination.” Melibro, Portal Literario “Strange, unusual, striking… Caza de conejos is an unorthodox books that will delight the most demanding taste.” Papel en blanco, Portal Literario

Published by: Spanish Editorial Zorro Rojo For other countries available

El discurso vacío (Empty talk)

NOVEL

Novel Trilce, Montevideo, 199; Interzona, 2006; Mondadori, Caballo de Troya, España, 2007; Debolsillo, España, 2008; Mondadori, Argentina, 2011.

“When one reaches a certain age, one is no longer the protagonist of one’s actions: everything is merely the consequence of previous actions. What one sowed has been growing surreptitiously and all of a sudden explodes into a sort of jungle that surrounds one on all sides, and the days can be opened up solely by dint of machete blows and then only to be choked out by the jungle again; and soon one discovers that any hope of escape is completely illusory, in that the jungle spreads faster that we can clear it and above all because the very notion of escape is erroneous; we cannot escape because we do not want to escape, and we do not want to escape because we have nowhere to go, because the jungle is one’s self, and escape would imply some sort of death or simply death. And even if there was once a time when one could die a certain kind of seemingly inoffensive death, now we know that those deaths were the seeds we sowed of the jungle we now are”. (Fragment) Considered his masterwork by many of his readers and some critics, Empty talk, is the story of a writer who spends his time observing his own calligraphy in search of answers about his identity. In the midst of a family crisis, fighting with his runaway wife, a dog with a yearning for freedom and a child who constantly interrupts his sacred concentration, the writer survives by grasping onto what he considers a maxim of calligraphy: “beautiful script, beautiful me”.

These sinuous lines give him answers about the meaning of writing, about the anxieties of creative writing and particularly about the always magical relationship of writing with life.

“An essential book, a cult work”. Rodolfo Fogwill “Each of his books is better than the one before”. Damián Tabarovsky, El País

Published in Spanish world-wide by: Random House Mondadori/Italian Jaca Book Edizioni For other countries available

NOVEL

Diario de un canalla y Burdeos 1972 (Diary of a swine and Bordeaux, 1972)

Both texts are the result of two Mario Levrero’s great living adventures, one for love, and other for need.

Both had an extensive effect on his writing and are a resounding sample of the denominational tone that dominated the author’s last years.

Bordeaux, 1972. Levrero went to France for love.

When it seemed that he was going to stay there, he started to talk about a certain recurring anxiety. One day, while he was reading the newspaper in the kitchen, he noticed that French was overrunning his mind, threatening with avoiding him to think in Spanish. Then he came back.

Levrero wrote this “nouvelle”, unpublished, at the end of his days, evoking the season spent in France with his then fiancée.

Diary of a swine In 1985, overwhelmed by debts and the lack of projects in Montevideo, Levrero agreed to move to Buenos Aires and run a couple of crossword magazines in a publishing company. Whe he discovered that he was living comfortably but without time to pay attention to his writing, he booked his first vacations in order to check the situation and take measures. The result was Diary of a swine.

This is the first work in which Levrero naked his feelings without hiding them behind the absurd or the humour, and that really means a rupture, a conversion, because since this happened, he began to write in a autobiographical way.

It was the same Levrero who described himself as a “swine”, because he felt surrended to materiality. And he adds: “I am writing for no reader, not even to read it myself. I write to write myself; it is an act of self-construction. Here I am recovering, here I am fighting to rescue pieces of myself that have been stuck to operating tables, to certain women, to certain cities, to the chipped and gaunt walls of my Montevideo apartment, which I will never see again, to

certain landscapes, to certain presences. Yes, I am going to do it. I am going to get it. Do not annoy me with the style neither the structure: this is not a novel, damn it. I am risking my life”.

“Diary of a swine is considered one of his major books, and it is a key to understand the ups and downs of an author who kept his particular philosophy of life to the last consequences.”

Andrés Ricciardulli, El Observador , Uruguay Publisher by: Spanish Mondadori , Randon House Mondadori For other countries available

NOVEL

Dejen todo en mis manos (Leave it all up to me)

Novel Random House Mondadori, Argentina; Caballo de Troya, España 2007, 121 pages A fairly unsuccessful writer who finds himself in a somewhat desperate financial situation is offered a deal by an editor. The company will give him an advance and publish his novel if he can discover the whereabouts of a certain Juan Pérez who had earlier sent them an exception manuscript from Penurias,a town far from the capital, without a return address. The writer accepts the assignment, and in his improvised role as a detective, travels to the town to try to locate the person behind the apparent pseudonym.

From this moment on, suppositions and investigations get all mixed up in his adventures as a writer turned detective: his contacts with the town prostitute, with the old, now retired school teacher, with the local columnist, with a rather impassioned amateur poetess, with a childhood enemy and with an enchanting travel companion who in the end is to help him solve the mystery of the unknown writer.

Written under the guise of a detective novel with abundant doses of humour.

“Dejen todo en mis manos is beautiful, meaningful, and important...it is not only a good way to spend some time, but also provides us with keys for understanding a part of the savage spirit of our times...” Hotel Kafka

Published in Spanish world-wide by Random House Mondadori/ Brasil, Rocco Editora / Francia, Éditions de L’Arbre For other countries available

París

NOVEL

Novel El Cid, 1980; Mondadori, Debolsillo, España, 2008; Editorial Carmel, Israel, 2010. 155 pages.

Prologue by Constantino Bertolo Along with The Place and The City, Paris makes up the Involuntary Trilogy (involuntary in the sense that the author only realized afterwards that he had written three novels in a row with the city as a common theme).

Paris is the story of someone who returns to a city where he has perhaps never been before. His return voyage has taken three hundred centuries and what he finds is the rusty shadow of a dead time: a taxi full of cobwebs with the corpse of the driver at the wheel, a thick layer of dust covering it all, a strange encounter with Marcel, the manager of a shop where he, it seems, had once worked.

A Paris shrouded in the elusive matter of dreams and a protagonist who senses that he has come back to this city in expectation of some event which he cannot point his finger on. In a leap into the void, to meet death, the character discovers that he has wings and can fly and so can be reborn and free himself from a lost time and an absurd, useless existence.

“Like Felisberto Hernández, Levrero is, above all, a writer about that which is ghostly, an alchemist who works with intimate spectres and the detritus of experience. Oliverio Coelho, Los Inrockuptibles “A legendary writer, Mario Levrero has gone from warranting consideration as an author of incontrovertible importance to that of a writer of the stature of the great names in Latin American literature: Borges, Onetti, Piglia, Aira, Fogwill”. Constantino Bertolo

Published in Spanish world-wide by Random House Mondadori; in Hebrew by Carmel. For other countries available

El lugar (The place)

NOVEL

Novel.

El Péndulo, Argentina, 1984. Mondadori, Debolsillo, Spain, 2008; Editorial Carmel, Israel, 2010.160 pages.

Prologue by Julio Llamazares The Place is the second novel of the Involuntary Trilogy (involuntary in the sense that the author only realized afterwards that he had written three novels in a row—The City, The Place and Paris—with the city as a common theme).

A man wakes up in an unfamiliar room. He is lying on the floor, in the dark, in street clothes. He is alarmed to realize that he has no idea how he got there. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot remember. His mind begins to weave a series of hypotheses but without finding one that conforms to the logic of the situation. So he decides to investigate. After examining the place in which he finds himself, he goes into another room like the first with two doors, one an entrance and one an exit, in which the passage of time is marked by lights going on and off.

“Humour, fantasy, a stifling Kafka-like mood…If we add a few drops of acid, traces of Freud and Richard Lester, the aroma of the best Chandler, the sadness of Gardel and the tango, the disquiet of the sleepless and the imperturbability of Onetti, we have ourselves an approximate picture of this book and its author….”

“An author who has surprised me more than anything has in a long time.” Julio Llamazares

Published in Spanish world-wide by Random House Mondadori; in Hebrew by Carmel. For other countries available.

La ciudad (The city)

NOVEL

Novel Tierra Nueva, Uruguay, 1970; Plaza & Janés 2000; Mondadori, Debolsillo, España, 2008; Editorial Carmel , Israel, 2010. 200 pages Prologue by Ignacio Echevarría Along with The Place and Paris, The City comprises the Involuntary Triology (involuntary in the sense that the author only realized afterwards that he had written three novels in a row with the city as a common theme).

At the beginning of The City, the protagonist, having just arrived at the bleak dwelling in which he is planning to live, goes out to find a place nearby to buy kerosene.

Then he goes for cigarettes, dry his clothes and other innocuous tasks that slowly take him further and further away from his home and into an alien city hazily defined.

“Life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it is so compressed that I can hardly understand, for example, how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without being afraid that—apart from accidents—even the time allotted to a normal, happy life is far too short for such a journey.”

This quote from Kafka contains one of the keys to this novel, for the writing of which Levrero himself admits that he “tried to imitate [Kafka] with the greatest precision at my disposal”.

Published in Spanish world-wide by Mondadori; in Hebrew by Carmel/Portuguese by Rocco Editora.

For other countries available

NOVEL

Nick Carter se divierte mientras el lector es asesinado y yo agonizo (Nick Carter has a good time while the reader is murdered and I lie dying)

Novel. Random House Mondadori. Argentina, 2009. 150 pages.

In light of a series of death threats, the Ponsobys, an old aristocratic family decide to hire detective Nick Carter.

To solve the case all he has to do is find a band of criminals and ne’er-do-wells who like to call themselves the “sea creatures” and locate their leader, the horrible Watson. For help he calls on Tinker, his faithful companion (a little man small enough to fit in his briefcase.) Nick’s method is simple: he relies on the aesthetic judgment events provide him with.

He always solves his cases but he in fact no longer cares.

Levrero offers us an experimental avant-garde aesthetic that seeks to go beyond the boundaries of literature by writing in the first and third person and addressing the reader and Nick Carter himself.

A parody of the cop novel, the installment novel, even the superhero genre. Embedded in the text are multiple readings that generate a reflection on identity, on the meaning of life…

“A really entertaining story”. Letras Libres “Mario Levrero has a marvelous gift for seeing things the way they are and the way they are not at the same time”. Revista Ñ, Clarín “Levrero defies convention”. Damián Tabarovsky, El País

Published in Spanish world-wide by Random House Mondadori/Italian Jaca Book Edizioni For other countries available

Fabián Casas Argentina 1965 Born in the Boedo area of Buenos Aires. Poet, narrator, essayist and journalist, he is one of the outstanding figures of Argentina’s “90’s generation¨. Studied philosophy, and edited the poetry journal 18 Whiskys, which had a major impact on the Buenos Aires literary scene.

In 2007 he received Germany’s prestigious Anna Seghers Prize for, as the jury said, “having an extraordinary poetry and for his work’s being a source of inspiration for the authors of Latin America.” Ocio, the film based on the novel of the same name and directed by Alejandro Lingenti and Juan Villegas, was shown at the Berlin Festival to excellent reviews.

Guadalajara Book Fair ( edition 2011) selected him as one of the writers who guarantees the continuation ofthe great Latinamerican writers of the XXth century.

His works have been translated into several languages.

“Fabián Casas constructs an extraordinarily convincing narrative world possessed of subtle humour and a dry, intense lyricism”. Ignacio Echevarría “One of the central poets in the objective line which beginning in the 90’s vigorously renewed Argentine poetry…A sensivity where without any posturing Schopenhauer and Astroboy play in the same league”. Edgardo Dobry, Babelia, the El País literary supplement.

“One of the most audacious writers”. Care Santos, El Cultural. El Mundo supplement “There is much of the Arlt of El juguete rabioso in Casas“. Alan Pauls Works Todos los Ensayos Bonsai, (All the Bonsais Essays). Essays , 2013 Los Lemmings (The Lemmıngs). Integrated stories, 2005, 2011 Horla City y otros (Horla Ciıty and Others). Complete poetry, 2010 Ensayos bonsai (Bonsai Essays). Essays, 2007 Ocio (Idleness). Novel, 2000 El spleen de Boedo (Boedo Blues). Poetry, 2004 Oda (Ode). Poetry, 2003 Rita viaja al cosmos con Mariano (Rıta and Mariano travel into space). Children’s story, 2009 Tuca. (Roach). Poetry 1990

ESSAY

Todos los ensayos Bonsái (All the bonsai essays)

Essays, Mondadori, 271 pages, 2013 What is hidden behind the cover photograph of the Beatles’ album Abbey Road? What do the films Rumble Fish, Stalker and The Night of the Hunter have in common?

What manifests the genius of great writers like Roberto Bolaño, William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett? All the bonsai essays gathers a exhaustive selection of the best articles from Fabián Casas, unpublished until now in Spain. The funny politics of Chavez, the extreme music from Cobain, the remembrance of Sylvia Plath, the poetry… Or did I mean football? These are only some of the topics on which the Argentinian writer reflects in these articles.

Halfway between personal texts, football report and literary criticism, and written with the close style that belongs to the author.

“Speaking to Fabián Casas was a new education for me”. Vigo Mortensen “An exceptional knack for quoting”. Elvio Gandolfo “Casas is a sniper. He always aims to the highest and hits with his sentences (…) He makes fun of everything, but he takes everything seriously”. El ojo Crítico “Casas never disappoints and he always stimulates. Hold on tight, it is a long journey”.César Prieto, efe eme Published by: Spain Mondadori For the other countries available

INTEGRATED STORIES

Los Lemmings (The Lemmings) Integrated stories Santiago Arcos, editor, 2005. Alpha Decay, 2011.

152 pages The voices that weave the stories in Los Lemmings y otros draw an area in the new Argentine narrative: the psychedelic, street Boedo of the late 20th Century, as a political and aesthetic anthropology of a generation, of a world.

“If these stories read like a short novel it is not on account of any experiment with genre but because of the continuity of their characters and their setting, the Buenos Aires neighbourhood known as Boedo.

Rather than a setting, Boedo is a vocation, a destiny, a complete world, with its border skirmishes, where the tango has been replaced by punk and the discotheque”. Babelia, El País.

“If these stories read like a short novel it is not on account of any experiment with genre but because of the continuity of their characters and their setting, the Buenos Aires neighbourhood known as Boedo. Rather than a setting, Boedo is a vocation, a destiny, a complete world, with its border skirmishes, where the tango has been replaced by punk and the discotheque”. Babelia, El País literary supplement.

“The rites of initiation into the adult world. The adult world seen as a place of exile for those who were once children. Childhood itself evoked as a lost paradise that comes with an unmistakable mythology and a very specific setting: Boedo, a working-class Buenos Aires neighbourhood. With this common-place material Fabián Casas constructs an extraordinarily convincing world possessed of subtle humour and dry, intense lyricism. He achieves this thanks to a quality that he radiates on both the stylistic and moral levels: authenticity. A sometimes slippery, dangerous category when talking of literature. But which provides evidence and content in this deceptively light, moving, entertaining book, which is situated in a space somewhere between a collection of stories, a novel in progress, and a book of memoirs”. Ignacio Echevarría “One of the most striking things about Casas’ prose is its precision. It never gets in its own way. What works is the anecdote, and within its universe, orality of course plays an important role. The power of the anecdote, its speed, its conviction, its variable weight, light enough to get inside and back out but powerful enough for the knock-out punch is what defines his way of narrating. His literature grows by itself, without ever losing touch with those who read it. It is perhaps for this reason that his stories as so similar to a good song”. Juan Terranova

Published by: Spanish: Santiago Arcos, Argentine/ Alpha Decay, Spain/ Portuguese Editora Rocco For other countries available

Ocio (Idleness)

NOVEL

Novel Santiago Arcos Editor, 2008. 105 pages Andrés, main character of this short novel lives with his father and brother. His mother, who brought some order to all their lives and gave them some connection, has died. Andrés locks himself up in his room almost entirely cut off from the world listening to music (he loves the second part of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, particularly the medley that ends in “The End”), reading, or writing texts he hopes to publish in a literary journal that some of his friends may get going.

It is with these friends he goes out at night, takes drugs…

Idleness has a rock ‘n roll spirit, but also has life beyond these references.

Idleness, the film based on the novel and directed by Alejandro Lingenti and Juan Villegas, was shown at the Berlin Festival to rave reviews.

“The power of the anecdote, its speed, its conviction, its variable weight, light enough to get inside and back out but powerful enough for the knockout punch is what defines his way of telling a story”. Juan Terranova. El interpretador “What holds this together is an imploded, vigorous family under attack…but also the Boedo neighbourhood, harsh, “annoying” yet fascinating for him who has experienced it and writes about it like in a good Jack London story, or in some of Roberto Arlt’s unforgettable plots”. Elvio Gandolfo. Revista Noticias “The episodic nature, the constant movement of microstories blend into a “background music“ which gives them support, the meticulous work with the language creates the illusion of orality and defines a personal style”. Sandro Barrella. La Nación “The reader can’t stop: he asks for more and more torture”. Guillermo Piro

Published by: Spanish Santiago Arcos/ Germany Rotbuch For other countries available

Aurora Venturini Argentina, 1922 She graduated in Philosophy and Education Sciences from the National University of La Plata. She worked as advisor in the Institute of Psychology and Re-education of Minors, where she met Eva Perón, with whom she collaborated and developed a very close friendship. In 1948 she was awarded the Premio Iniciación (Initiation Prize) by Luis Borges in person for her book El solitario (The Solitaire). She studied Psychology at the University of Paris, city where she chose to live as an exile for 25 years after the Revolución Libertadora established by the Peronist Régime. In Paris she lived with Violette Leduc and became friends with JeanPaul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco and Juliette Gréco.

In Sicily she made the acquaintance of Salvatore Quasimodo, whom she also frequented.

She has translated and written analytical works on poets such as Isidore Ducasse, Count of Lautréamont, Francoise Villon and Arthur Rimbaud; translations for which the French Government rewarded her with the Iron Cross Medal.

“Aurora Venturini lacks silly sanity”. Vicente Aleixandre “Aurora Venturini, the most extraordinary discovery in Argentinian literature in the latest years”. Periodista digital "An admirable freedom for writing." Los InRocks Works Eva, Alpha y Omega, 2014 Los rieles (The rails) Novel, 2013 El marido de mi madrastra. Short stories, 2012 Nosotros, los Caserta. (We, the Caserta) Novel, (1992, 2011) Las primas (The Cousins) Novel, 2007 Bruna Maura-Maura Bruna, 2006 John W. Cooke ,2005 Racconto. Poesía, 2004 Alma y Sebastián. Cuentos, 2001 Venid amada alma, 2001 Lieder,1999 Me moriré en París, con aguacero. Novela,1998 Hadas, brujas y señoritas. Cuentos,1997 45 poemas paleoperonistas,1997 Evita, mester de amor (1997), en colaboración con Fermín Chávez.

Poesía gauchipolítica federal,1994 Las Marías de Los Toldos. Novela,1991

Eva Alpha y Omega

NOVEL

Sudamericana, 2014. 224 pages Aurora Venturini takes up the great theme in her life: her relationship with Eva Peron in an autobiographical novel which has now been published in one volume with another one of her great texts of historical fiction about Peronism.

The Venturini of yesterday and today, with the same mastery as always.

Two books

by Aurora Venturini in one volume.

The one, Eva, Alpha y Omega, which recounts her friendship with Eva Peron, had to wait years to be written; the other, Pogrom de la cabecita negra, waited years to be re-edited.

The two function as a whole: they not only clearly trace out Venturini’s stylistic career, but also speak of her relationship with the Peronist movement and its process of systole and diastole, which begins with its spiritual leader and travels through the blood in its veins: “ The only privileged ones, my little plebs“.

In Eva, Alpha y Omega, her most recent book, Venturini reviews her legendary friendship with Eva Duarte de Peron in a fiction with precious inlays of reality (or viceversa). Pogromdel cabecita negra (1969) is one of the essential novels by the author of Las primas, a simple, true, moving story about one of darkest moments in Argentina’s history.

"An admirable freedom for writing." Los InRocks "Venturini reviews her mythological friendship with Eva Duarte de Perón in a fiction that has precious inlaid pieces of reality (or viceversa)." TELAM

Published by: Spanish Sudamericana

Los rieles (The rails)

INTEGRATED STORIES

Mondadori Argentina, 2013. 182 pages A series of short stories, in which the author of The cousins displays her family vitriolic vignettes, her gallery of outcasts, and her unrivalled literary mastery.

“Variations on Mr. Le Diable”, is the title of one of the chapters of this poignant book, in which Aurora Venturini stops firmly in the narrow limit between dreams and awakefulness, between madness and sanity, or better, between life and death, in order to relate those vast instants of her astonishing experience in which she felt that the time to leave this world had come. However, fighting with the words as her main weapon, here she is, ninety years old, proving why her writing (what is the same to her life) can fight Mr. Le Diable and win the match”.

“One of her best books”. Mariana Enríquez, Radar Libros, Página 12 “A prose with a highly expressive strength (…) A bristly syntaxis. (…) A poetry of the disproportion and a biting humour as a vanishing point (…) all this performs a aesthetical phenomenon of unique characteristics in Spanish.” Jorge Consiglio, La Nación “The labels are too small; they are incomplete. What is the same as saying they are unnecessary. The Rails can be read as a novel, memoirs, a treatise on self-help for hospitalization times. (…) Anything that is on these pages is pompous, superficial, hackneyed. Aurora knows how bring you down to reality with a thump”. Walter Lezcano.

Publisher by: Spanish worl-wide by Mondadori.

For other countries, available.

Las primas (The Cousins)

NOVEL

Novel. Caballo de Troya, Random House Mondadori, 2008. 192 pages Nueva Novela Prize 2007 held by Página 12.

Award Otras voces, otros Ámbitos, 2010 A novel relating the story of an initiation set in a confusing atmosphere during the forties in the city of La Plata, it unfolds the tortuous world of an obscure, non functional middle class family. Subjects such as suburb mythologies, the concept of family, female sexuality and social promotion through the practice of the fine arts are put on stage and scrutinized by the unmistakable voice of the narrator: Yuna, who stares wildly at the world she has to live in; a voice that can be candid and brutal, sharp and pensive at the same time, and which is written in a prose that defies and endangers all conventions on the use of language in literature. In the crossroads between a delirious autobiography and the rather shameless exercise of intimate ethnography, The Cousins is a unique novel, a piece of literature taken to the extreme, genuinely disconcerting. It corners the reader by calling into question all those things that books usually ignore or hide carefully, in silence.

“Unique, extreme novel, disconcertingly original…” Jury of the Prize New Novel awarded by Página 12, composed by Juan Ignacio Boldo, Juan Forn, Rodrigo Fresán, Alan Pauls, Sandra Russo, Guillermo Saccomanno y Juan Sasturain.

“Half way between a delirious autobiography and a shameless exercise of initimate ethnography, Las primas is a unique, extreme novel, of an incredible originality”. Alan Pauls “A novel written with morbid genius”. Enrique Vila Matas, El País “Ferocious, full of sarcasm (…) with a torrential style, foreign to conventions…” Magazine Qué leer “Brave, unheard of and memorable novel…” El periódico de Cataluña.

Published by: Spanish worldwide Random House Mondadori/ Perú Estruendomudo France Robert Laffont/ Italy Salani.

Andrés Rivera

Argentina 1928 Marcos Ribak, to cite his real name, a textile worker, writer and journalist, was born into a family of immigrant workers and as a member of the Communist Party has been a part of the vicissitudes of the Argentine workers’ movement.

He began his activities as a writer and journalist in the 1950’s.

Rese arch into history as a starting point, material related to politics, autobiographical elements, oppressive forms of power, betrayal, violence, all this projected on a web of human conflicts is the identifying stamp of his narrative poetry.

He has received various major prizes and awards, among the most notable being: El Premio Nacional de Literatura (The National Prize for Literature), for his novel, The Revolution is an Eternal Dream in 1992; el Segundo Premio Municipal de Novela (The Second Municipal Novel Prize) in 1985; el Premio Konex de Platino (the Platinum Konex Prize) (1994); and in 2011, el Premio Fondo Nacional de las Artes (Prize for Literature of the National Arts Fund), the institution’s highest award, given each year to recognize the work by an artist or writer who, through his intellectual and artistic work, has made a positive contribution to the enrichment of Argentina’s cultural heritage.

“Andrés Rivera is the Argentinian Joseph Conrad.” Juan Gelman “…he turns each of the sentences in which he unfolds his narrations into solid, unmoving stones.” Antonio Jiménez Morato, Público.

“I have known many writers and artists. Almost all are worse than their work. Andrés Rivera is one of the few people has the stature of what he writes.” Guillermo Saavedra, Clarín

Works Hay que matar. Novel, 2001, 2012 Kadish. Novel, 2011 Guardia Blanca. Novel, 2009 Estaqueados. Short stories, 2008 El profundo sur. Novel, 1999, 2006, 2007 Esto por ahora. Novel, 2005 Cría de asesinos. Short stories, 2004

Ese manco Paz. Novel, 2003 Hay que matar. Novel, 2001, 2012 Tierra de exilio. Novel, 2000 La lenta velocidad del coraje. Short stories, 1998 El farmer. Novel, 1996, 2000 El verdugo en el umbral, 1994. 1995 Club de los XIII prize.

Mitteleuropa. Short stories, 1993 La sierva. Novel,1992. Best book of 1992 by Fundación del Libro El amigo de Baudelaire. Novel 1991, 2011 La revolución es un sueño eterno. Novel, 1987, 2010. Argentina’s National Prize for Literature.

En esta dulce tierra. Novel, 1984. Second in Municipal Prize for Literature Nada que perder. Novel, 1982 Una lectura de la historia. Short stories, 1982 Ajuste de cuentas. Short stories, 1972 Cita. Short stories, 1965 Sol de sábado. Short stories, 1962 Los que no mueren. Novel, 1959 El precio. Novel, 1957.

El Profundo Sur

NOVEL

Novel. Emecé 2006; Veintisieteletras, 2007. 96 pages Why does a man kill?

1919. The world is seething with revolutions. Buenos Aires bleeds during its Tragic Week. The Patriotic League and the Army repress the strikers indiscriminately. Bolsheviks, Jews, workers, anarchists, foreigners… all of them are “the same” and all are “enemies of the Fatherland”. On a street like any other, the fates of four men intersect and interchange. Victims and executioners, guided by chance at the imprecise boundaries between civilization and barbarism. Based on this historical event and brief, but forceful biographical sketches of the characters, Andrés Rivera, winner of Argentina’s National Literature Prize and one of Latin America’s most important contemporary writers, reflects on the scaffolding of violence, resentment and frustration, on the naïveté of certain passions and the fragility of existence. The restraint and narrative rhythm of his prose, the choice of words and its silences brings us a work of unusual, beautiful intensity.

“This novel is pure muscle”. Javier Rodríguez Marcos, El País. “…a powerful voice, with brilliant, overwhelming, sharp metaphors….Rivera knows how to touch sensitive chords, how to make a short story hurt”. Emma Rodríguez, El Mundo. “…he turns each of the sentences in which he unfolds his narrations into solid, unmoving stones.” Antonio Jiménez Morato, Público.

“Rivera’s prose explodes with the implacable effectiveness of a lethal weapon: it avoids long sentences and submits the narrative rhythm to a machine-gun effect devoid of pathos.” ABC “A classic of current Argentina literature.” Babelia “To try to define Andrés Rivera is to talk about an impressive literary force. A spell that, at times, is hard to explain.” Eduardo Belgrano Rawson. “ Rivera’s narration lies….It is the creation of a truth….Rivera does not write to be , he writes to find the truth. There is in Rivera a fictional construction of the past. That is not even past. Because Rivera does not write about it, but about the present.” José Pablo Feinmann,Clarín.

“The deep voice of Rivera, the moist sound of his prose…a language which…crumbles and settles until it reaches a thickness that borders on the poetic.” Susana Szwarc, La Nación.

Published in Spanish worldwide by Veintisiete Letras

Hay que matar

NOVEL

Novel. Alfaguara 2001. Seix Barral 2012 116 pages In the South of the South there was an empire. The empire did not dissolve: it has other, more impersonal names. But it still dictates the law. It still kills.

Milton Roberts, a Welshman, had a bit of land in the South of the South, some sheep, four or five dogs and two or three horses and a son named Byron Roberts. Until The Company made its offer and he uttered a fearless No. Bill Farrel had escaped, starving, from Ireland and was the police commissioner in the South of the South. He has a wife called Rosario. With Bill Farell, Byron Roberts learned, among other things, the trade of killing.

In the South of the South there is more than enough oil and violence. Power is the property of a few, but vengeance, unlike sex and whisky, is one of the things that cannot be bought or sold.

There a man kills the way AndrĂŠs Rivera writes: in search of knowledge and justice.

Published world-wide by Seix Barral

La sierva

NOVEL

Novel. Alfaguara 1999; Seix Barral 2009. 75 pages Was recognized in 1993 by Fundación el Libro as the best work published in 1992 La Sierva tells of the intense, passionate relationship between a servant, Lucrecia, and a judge, Saúl Bedoya, in the Buenos Aires of the second half of the 19th Century. Through the relationship between these characters, Rivera delves into the world of power, politics, corruption and the complexities of the human soul.

Lucrecia is a woman of bastard origin willing to do anything to become the mistress. But while she did not hesitate to kill her step-father in order to take his place and his meager belongings, she is only a servant.

Her master is Judge Saúl Bedoya, a notable figure of the emerging Argentine bourgeoisie, who, fascinated by her savage beauty and temperament, has decided to overlook Lucrecia’s guilt. Subjected to the all the whims and perversities of her master, Lucrecia merely applies herself to them as a deviant manner of learning the rites of power.

From the eccentric point of view of a woman obsessed by command and wealth, the story illuminates the duplicity of a class dazzled by its own opulence.

Steeped in electrifying, dark eroticism, written in a dry, forceful prose.

“La Sierva is another fundamental novel by an indispensable writer”. Clarín

Published in Spanish world-wide by Seix Barral

Guardia blanca

NOVEL

Novel. Seix Barral, 2009. 160 pages In a country of rich landowners and middle classes not even the force of the wind could dispel the “abominable oblivion thirty thousand people had disappeared into.” Like a sign of ill fortune, there was a succession of unpunished crimes, contract killings, deaths that no longer related to old utopias.

Now people kill for power, for money, for lust.

Growing old is sad, and incurable. Pablo Fontán lives alone in the Belgrano district, in an apartment he inherited from his mother. At seven in the evening he pours himself a whisky and sits down in front of the television. Now and then he looks out the window in the direction of the river, lights a cigarette, reads. The memories come one after the other and some return obsessively: the images of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, certain things he has read, bits of journeys, a brief visit he paid on Juan Carlos Onetti, the anti-Bolshevik opinions of a tour guide in Prague. While capitalism is crumbling all over the world and old social struggles survive through nostalgia, Guardia Blanca reminds us that, beyond the bloody wars and enthusiastic revolutions, almost nothing has changed. The pages of history and the news in the papers confirm that there is no power without money and that absolution can be bought for a set price.

“Andrés Rivera again gratifies the reader with this magnificent, highly critical novel, full of fine irony, written with the refinement and the richness of language characteristic of one of Argentina’s best contemporary writers”. Página 12.

“Rivera masterful stages this tragic character from which the personal lives of men cannot escape.” Revista Eñe

Published in Spanish world-wide by Seix Barral

El amigo de Baudelaire

NOVEL

Novel. Seix Barral 2008; Veintisiete Letras, 2011. 88 pages “I like the smell of the country, Charles. On horseback I contemplate for long, long minutes thousands of sheep like a grey, motionless sea….Do you know, Charles, what the true smell of the pampa is? I do: the smell of money”. ( Extract) A straightforward story of power and its motives.

El amigo de Baudelaire starts off in Argentine history but then goes beyond the boundaries of time and space to treat in a stripped-down, uncompromising manner man’s relationship with failure, power, fear and sex.

Saúl Bedoya, wealthy, cultured, perverse, a child of the civil wars that laid the ground for the triumph of liberalism in Argentina, remembers his dissipated youth in Paris. He was one of those idle heirs of gauchos come into money who threw away their fortunes in search of a title, amusement and a veneer of high European culture. Those Argentinians who “no longer exist”, as Céline put it. Now old, “obsessive and obscene” he translates in his private notes what is happening in a country in a process of formation: a new bourgeoisie, cynical and voracious, that will use resources of any kind to gain power. Everything can be bought and sold—land, cattle, stocks, railways, newspapers, presidential candidates, men and women—for less than the price of a steer: even France’s best poet, with whom he claims to have shared drink and confessions in Paris: “Baudelaire, in Buenos Aires, would have been a high-class whore. Whom I would keep.”

The caustic, implacable protagonist subjects his conscience to a rigorous examination in which he discovers both his ambition and his indifference. He admits his sexual and affective perversions, his readings and plagiarisms, his own crime and his fear of being murdered. And he reflects in a deep, straightforward way on what a “nation” is, calling on the spirits of Baudelaire and Sarmiento, the intellectual who imagined a modern Argentina, which he inspired and whose victim he became.

Relentless, direct, rigorous prose, it seduces in every line. El amigo de Baudelaire, like an Argentine Gatsby, shows in an exceptional manner what lurks behind wealth and its motivations. “…a forceful voice, with brilliant, overwhelming, sharp metaphors….Rivera knows how to touch sensitive chords, how to make a short story hurt”. Emma Rodríguez, El Mundo.

“Andrés Rivera writes about everyday life, which with the passage of time becomes history that of a country like Argentina, splashed with ideological, labour and political movements that have resulted in various dictatorships that have sown its days with victims. Like his characters, today he feels a profound disenchantment, or perhaps, like

a defeated man who has not ceased to postulate with his literature some of the utopias he dreamed of and through which he wanted to change the world”. Pedro E. Domene, La tormenta en un vaso.

“This is indeed a narrator with his own voice and tone”. Revista De Libros “The problem set out in each work gives us a human dimension of man in the face of failure, of power, of neglect and in the face of life and death, all these universal, eternal themes in literature.” Teresita Mauro, Espéculo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Published in Spanish worldwide by Veintisiete Letras

María Teresa Andruetto

Argentina, 1954 Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award 2012.

The construction of social and individual identity, the sequels of the dictatorship in her country and the female universe are some of the main lines of her work. Her books are read both by young and adult readers, breaking the generational barriers.

She has been working for the last 30 years in children literature, where she took part on the training of school teachers; she has also founded centers of study and specialized magazines, has directed collections and taken part in reading plans. She is guest teacher in many graduate and posgraduate courses and invited author in congresses, seminars, fairs and meetings, in her country and abroad. Her books are subject of study in Argentinian, American and European Universities.

Her writing won her the awards of Luis Tejada (1993), Fondo Nacional de las Artes (National Fund for the Arts) 2002, and in 2001 she was finalist of the Award Romulo Gallegos with her novel Lengua Madre. She was included in the Honour Lists of the IBBY, has been awarded the Iberoamerican SM Prize in 2009.

Her work has been used as a base for short movies, musical and poetical shows, theatre adaptations and other events. www.teresaandruetto.com.ar

Works Adults Cacería (Hunting Game). Short stories, 2012 Ribak, Reedson, Rivera. (Conversations with Andrés Rivera). Essay 2011 Lengua madre (Mother Tongue) novel, 2010 La Mujer en Cuestión (The Woman in Question) novel, 2003

Essay La lectura, otra revolución , 2014 Hacia una Literatura sin adjetivos, 2009

La lectura, otra revolución

Essay.

2014

ESSAY

Fondo de Cultura Económica,

The question is not whether nowadays there are more readers or less, but what to do to improve the quality of readers themselves. A task that not only involves families and schools, as reading areas where we can grow a conscience about ourselves, but also engages writers and publishers that, through their jobs, create one kind of readers or another depending on how they resist or comply with the demand of a single way of telling.

According to this, Andruetto maintains, literature is a realm of contempt capable of guiding readers, in the course of reading, through risks, struggles and the difficult task of facing their failures. In the act of reading, a book becomes a living entity, it poses questions, disturbs us and teaches us to look beyond what we know of ourselves. And these kind of books ask for a reader who can understand that the only freedom of thought is the freedom we earn. This is the revolution we must undertake in the realm of reading. With a critical eye, María Teresa Andruetto traces in these essays— most of them from lectures, forums and conferences about children’s and young people’s literature and the promoting of reading—different paths to the understanding of what reading means nowadays.

Published by : Spanish Fondo de Cultura Económica For other countries available

Ccccc

Inés Garland Argentina, 1960 She works free lance and coordinates creative writing workshops. A jury from the National Arts’ Fund formed by Liliana Heker, Ana María Shua y Vicente Batista awarded her book Una Reina Perfecta in 2005. Several of the short stories in the book received Latin-american awards and the short story A Perfect Queen has been translated to English for the National Welsh Review. Her novel Piedra, papel o tijera was elected Best Novel of the Year by Alija (Children’s and Young people’s Literature Association). It has been translated to German as Wei ein unsichtbares Band.

Works La arquitectura del océano., Short Stories, 2014 El jefe de la manada. Novel young readers, 2014 Piedra, papel o tijera (Stone, paper or scissors) Novel young readers, 2009 Una reina perfecta. Short Stories, 2008.

El rey de los centauros. Novel, 2006.

Awards: Her short stories’ book “Cerca de una ausencia” was awarded the second prize by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes 2005 (published under the title of “Una Reina Perfecta”).

Her short stories have been published in several of “La mujer de mi vida” literary magazine’s issues and she was chosen for the section “El elegido” to celebrate the magazines’ fifth anniversary.

STORIES

La arquitectura del océano (The Architecture of the Ocean)

Stories. Alfaguara , 2014. 112 pages To grow, love and live is like diving into the depths of the ocean. Craved for love, the characters in these stories— most of them women—navigate the world hooked to their own desires and to the signals given by others: signals that show the way, that announce calm waters or the danger of wreckage.

Intimate, subtle, reflexive, the sixteen stories that make up this book speak of the fruitless search for love, and confirm Ms Garland’s deep knowledge of the way desire unfolds. With refined precision, she perseveres in capturing human nature, as elusive as the architecture of the ocean.

A teen ager witnesses how her father flirts with her best friend right in front of her own mother’s eyes; an accident during a family’s vacation shatters a prejudiced woman’s deepest beliefs; three sisters stay under the care of a perverse nanny; attraction and repulse coexist in a couple’s sexual life.

Published by: Spanish Alfaguara.

For other countries available

Constantino Bértolo

España, 1946.

Degree in Spanish Philology, Universidad Complutense, Madrid.

One of Spain’s most prestigious critics and editors.

Was director of the Debate publishing company and is currently literary director of the Caballo de Troya line at Penguin Random House.

Has been literary critic for the magazine El Urogallo and the newspapers El País and El Independiente.

From 1978 to 1985 he participated in the editing of the Anaya publishing company’s Colleción Tus Libros.

In the 1990´s he co-founded the Escuela de Letras in Madrid where he was director of literature. He currently lectures in the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona´s Master´s program in Publishing; the University of Salamanca-Santillana Group´s Master´s program in Publishing; and the Ibero-American Master´s in Publishing.

He has participated in various conferences on literature and reading in both Europe and Latin America. In 2009, he was awarded the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Foundation´s Prize for Journalism on Reading.

He is the author of various studies on publishing and reading: La narrativa española entre 1975-1985. (Revista de Occidente); Leer ¿para qué? (Revista Educación y Bibliotecas, Madrid, 1995); La Edición sin editores o el Capitalismo sin capitalistas. (Revista Archipiélago. Madrid, 2003).

Works: Libro de huelgas, revueltas y revoluciones. Editorial 451, 2009.

El ojo crítico. Essay. Ediciones B, 2009.

La cena de los notables. Sobre lectura y crítica. Essay. Editorial Periférica, 2008.

Cómo se lee un libro. Essay. Editorial Alborado, 1987

ESSAY

La cena de los notables. Sobre Lectura y crítica (The notables dinner) Essay. Editorial Periférica, 2008. 256 pages.

La cena de los notables is a sharp, brilliant essay on reading, writing and literary criticism, in the line of Terry Eagleton or Raymond Williams, based in the concept of responsibility upon written (read) word, and the importance of community against individualism.

This essay was the product of years of contact with literary activity on the part of its author, Constantino Bértolo, one of Spain´s most prestigious critics and editors. It is also the product of a reflection on some of elements crucial to this activity: writing, reading, and criticism.

La cena de los notables attempts to articulate the meaning of literature based on one central idea: literature as violence—you listen, I talk—which requires for its acceptance on the part of the reader a constituent pact between the responsibility of the one who demands to be heard and that of the one who accepts the silence reading implies. Literature as the place where two responsibilities as to the use of the collective words, that of writers and that of readers, meet, confront one another and respond to one another. Starting from an elucidation of this pact, and by analyzing and commenting on works such as Martin Eden by Jack London,Madame Bovary by Gustave de Flaubert, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Mayor Casterbridgeby Thomas Hardy, the essay offers us a unique line of argumentation about reading and its mechanisms, about the act of writing and its temptations and about literary criticism and its limits.

“An honest, intelligent, free book.” José Martín, Diario ABC “La cena de los notable is one of those books worth going back to, like a compass that keeps us from losing our way.” Guillermo Busutil, Revista Mercurio.

“La cena de los notables is a banquet of literary wisdom.” Gonzalo Garrido “An exhaustive, entertaining analysis of the implications of the process of reading, the importance of community in this

process, the “technological” changes that have brought about variations over time in the roles of writers, editors and critics, the situation in the market.” Literaturas.com “Bértolo´s engaging while demanding prose and the convincing nature of his arguments hold the reader´s attention from the very first page.” Juan Carlos Sierra, La voz digital.

“Clear and precise.” Diario ABC “In equal measure surprising and thrilling are the pages dedicated to two great literary characters: Martin Eden and Emma Bovary.”

“This book, severe and austere, defends the concept of literature as “commitment” and as “responsibility” toward the world around one.” Francisco José Martín, Diario ABC “A book which promises reflections on reading and writing from the hand of this peregrine falcon of our letters is, from the start, promising, as would be a book from anyone who we suspect knows much more than he has ever told.” Care Santos Published by: España Editorial Periférica/ Brasil Livros da Matriz/ Serbia Glasnik

Horacio Convertini Argentina, 1963 He is a journalist, who worked as chief editor of the police news section in the newspaper Clarín, and is one of the most powerful voices of the new Argentinean thriller literature.

He has been awarded with such important prizes as The International Thriller and Detective Literature Award Azabache, The Silverio Cañadas Memorial 2013, given in the Gijón´s Thriller Week to the best debut work for The solitude of Evil. He also won the Thriller Contest Extremo Negro-BAN! with his novel The last Miracle.

His short stories have deserved numbers of awards in Spain and Argentina, among them, the Cosecha Eñe, the Adolfo Bioy Casares, the Tierra de Monegros...

“Horacio Convertini: a precise and overwhelming prose”. Pablo Ramos “Convertini accomplishes an almost invisible caudal which impels to keep reading till you find the central point, the knot of the story”. Sergio Kisielewsky, Página 12 “Horacio Convertini reinvents with originality the thriller rules”. Norberto Battista, La Nación "Convertini has a passion for narrating. His prose is a machine gun that fires heavy ammunition. Situations, characters and plot intertwine to form an unstoppable clockwork from which his readers will be unable to escape". Revista Eñe

Published works: El último milagro (The last Miracle) Novel. Del Nuevo Extremo, 2013. Winner of the Contest Extremo Negro-BAN! New Pompey. Novel. Puntocero 2012.

La soledad del mal (The Solitude of Evil) Novel. Eduvim, 2012. International Thriller and Detective Novel Prize Azabache and Silverio Cañada Memorial 2013 of the Gijón’s Black Week, Spain.

The reinforcement - El refuerzo. Novel, 2008, 2010. Second Prize Gabriel Sijé Award, Spain.

Los que están afuera (y otros cuentos infelices) (The ones who are outside (and other unhappy tales)). Short stories. Paradiso, 2008. Fondo Nacional de las Artes Prize, 2013.

Children’s literature: Terror en Diablo Perdido (Terror in Diablo Perdido) Juvenile fiction. Sigmar, 2013.

Prize Sigmar of Juvenile and Chilren’s literature.

La noche que salvé al Universo (The night I saved the universe) -Juvenile fiction.

Sigmar, 2010.

La leyenda de los Invencibles (Legend of the Invincible) Juvenile fiction. SM, 2009.

THRILLER

La soledad del mal ( The solitude of evil) Thriller.Publisher: Editorial Eduvin, 2012. 141 pages Azabache Thriller and Detective International Prize. Argentina, 2012 Silverio Cañada Memorial Prize – Gijon´s Black Week. Spain, 2013 Báez Ayala, a ruthless murderer, roams around the city like a hungry wolf, looking for victims that deserve the sacrifice of death. To do it, he makes perverse plans that allow him get close to the victims, win their confidence and find in their insignificant souls the breaking point that will make the crime a liberating ritual. A psycho who kills using a refined psicologic sadism, till he comes across someone different: an enigmatic woman who defies him, who attracts him (perhaps because she resembles to him), someone who will make him shiver for the first time.

The crimes of a murderer who before being a victimizer was a victim. And an idea: evil carries an irretrievable loneliness, whose only way out is the destruction of the neighbours. With accurate brushstrokes, Convertini manages to draw with mastery his characters: a murderer, a conventional teacher, a jaded housewife, a jilted lesbian, a paedophile priest, a failed actor...

“A mature work, which in a little time could set itself up in a canonical of the genre.”

Guillermo Orsi, jury of the Azabache Prize “The solitude of Evil is adscribed to the detective genre, but it also modifies it. Even better, it makes its main attributes complex." Diego De Angelis, Ñ Magazine . Diario Clarín “Convertini investigates succesfully on the idea that every victimizer was a victim first.

The solitude of Evil enlightens certain deep darkness of the human condition.” Martín Kasañetz, supplement Radar, Página12 “Convertini shows us the blackest things that can nest inside oneself.” Leonardo Oyola, jury of the Azabache Prize

“Horacio Convertini reinvents with originality the detective genre rules�. Norberto Battista, ADN Cultura Magazine

Published by: spanish Editorial Eduvin.

For other countries available

El Refuerzo (The Reinforcement)

THRILLER

Novel. Ediciones Punto Cero, 2010. 109 pages.

Second Prize - Gabriel Sijé Short Novel Award (Spain, 2008) Tank Millán is an undistinguished football player in the twilight of his career. He drags a chronic injury in his right knee and he has the certainty of that there is no longer future for him. Glory is a forgotten dream and life is a customary fight in fields of bare lawn, in the most miserable and far away spots of the world.

He goes back to Buenos Aires, after having played a season in Haiti, with the eagerness of winning Verónica back, the prostitute he is in love with. But he has no money, and without money the world does not work. His agent proposes him to play the final of an amateur tournament in a lost village in the Pampa.

But, what seems to be a perfect deal becomes suddenly a tangle of absurd and violent events, in which Millán will risk his own life.

Football is like a planet which only gives a face to the sun. On its shiny and warm face there are players who do not have the current account of a Hollywood star. But there is other side, dark, cold, forlorn; where glory is a long forgotten dream. The Reinforcement tells the story of a football player who runs desperately after his luck in that region so far away from the TV cameras and from the glamour of the great champions. There, where passions twist till madness. And where Death can hide in the fine print of a contract.

“The rhythm drags the reader to the outcome, and the best of the farce reverberates in the tragicomic tone”. Alejandro Caravario, Magazine Un caño “With an attractive mix of parody and thriller, Horacio Convertini tells the penuries of Tank Millán, a football player whose fate is decided by his knee. (...) The author dives us to a delirium which has little to envy César Aira”. Gabriel Cetkovich Bakmas, Diario Perfil “Loyal to the Argentinean football literature, Convertini brings us a good short novel set in the underworld of football, populated by lumpen, losers and social climbers. Here there is neglect, mud and death." Diario Búsqueda, Uruguay.

Publisher by: Argentina Ediciones Punto Cero.

For other countries available

El último milagro (The last miracle)

THRILLER

Novel. Editorial del Nuevo Extremo, 2013. 174 pages Winner of the Novel Contest Extremo NegroBAN! 2013 Deceptions, lies, fights, conspiracies, shady deals and murders encircling Argentinean football come to literature with The last miracle, a thriller which portrays the worse of the atmosphere surrounding the most popular sport in this Southamerican country.

The Racing Club, an important football club in Argentina, struggles for staying in the First Division. Its chairman is not qualified for the position, the coach spends more time with prostitutes than in the trainings, the best player wants to be sold to Europe, and the hooligans are always in the centre of the stage.

In this context, a group of Japanese scientists offer the club’s chairman to turn, thanks to technology, one of the team’s strikers into the best player of the planet: A biotechnological and unstoppable Messi. Then, the conspiracies and crimes will arrive.

And the streets of Buenos Aires will witness a blood bath.

“Although it could be mistaken with the reality of Argentinean football, it is fiction”.

“The last miracle is a thriller with hooligans and football miseries, writen by Horacio Convertini with a colloquial style, impeccable and giddy, that will catch the reader in every page”. Ray Collins, writer and jury of the Extremo Negro Award.

"Convertini has a passion for narrating. His prose is a machine gun that fires heavy ammunition. Situations, characters and plot intertwine to form an unstoppable clockwork from which his readers will be unable to escape". Revista Eñe

Publisher by: Argentina Editorial del Nuevo Extremo For other countries available

Marcelo Luján

Argentina, 1973 Marcelo Luján is a journalist and a writer. He coordinates workshops on Creative Writing in Madrid, where he has been living since 2001.

He has published Flores para Irene or (Flowers for Irene) (short stories, Santa Cruz de Tenerife Prize 2004), En algún cielo or (In some sky) (short stories, Ciudad de Alcalá de Narrativa Prize), La mala espera (The wrong await) Prize Ciudad de Getafe for Black Novel, 2009;Arder en invierno ( Burning in winter) Short stories, 2010 and a dozen short stories in different anthologies.

Part of his work has been selected in campaigns to foster reading.

He was second to the Clarín Prize 2005, whose jury was composed by José Saramago, Rosa Montero and Eduardo Belgrano Rawson.

“Marcelo Luján possesses a rich and direct language, his narrative pulse is firm and his characters and environments always surprise us”. Óscar Urra “The writing of Lujan alternately flashes gusts of poetry and prose, condensing the atmosphere with good literature.” Juan Carlos Chirinos, El Nacional

Works Moravia, novel, 2012 Arder en el invierno ( Burning in the winter) Short stories, 2010 La mala espera (The wrong await) novel, 2009 El desvío (The Detour) Short story,2007 En algún cielo (In some sky), Short stories, 2007 Flores para Irene (Flowers for Irene), Short stories, 2004

Moravia

NOVEL

Novel. El Apleph, 2012, 170 pages Buenos Aires, 1950. Juan Kosic, now an established orchestra bandoneon player, returns to his birthplace fifteen years after leaving it, accompanied by his wife and little daughter. He turns up at the boarding house his mother has been running for over forty years in Colonia Buen Respiro, a God-forsaken village lost in the vastness of the Argentine pampa, but without revealing his identity.

Juan Kosic wants to show his mother that he has succeeded financially thanks to the profession that she denied him and that brought about their separation. But the story takes an irreversible turn when their meeting generates a catastrophic misunderstanding.

In this novella, based on a short news ítem appearing in Camus’s The Stranger, the author gives us his reflection on the danger of playing with appearances and human beings’ capacity for destruction. As in the Greek tragedies, hubris and ambition determine the fate of the characters and lead them toward a dramatic ending.

Moravia creates a perfect mood of foreboding on the long road home again.

"The story has powerful foundations and is well solved." Ernesto Calabuig, El Cultural .

"With this bokk, Marcelo Luján defines himself as one of the most lucid writers of his generation.” Ana María Shua “I daresay we are in front of one of the great novels of this year." Lorenzo Silva, El Mundo . "A wild work as far as emotions are concerned, careful in the form and intense in its content." Marian Chaparro, Koult ."One has to be grateful to the bleakness and the precision of the language: nothing is missing or out of place." Raúl Argemí, Sigueleyendo ."Luján's prose is something one would love to imitate, without knowing how to." Javier Márquez, Esquire .

"This is one of these texts that moves something inside you, that surprises and touches you." El placer de la lectura.

“The writing of Lujan alternately flashes gusts of poetry and prose, condensing the atmosphere with good literature.” Juan Carlos Chirinos, El Nacional “A novel with a high concentration of poetic beauty.” Alex VonKarma, Bloggerizados

“Moravia introduces the reader into a storm of emotions from which he won’t escape unhurt.” Ariadna García, La tormenta en un vaso, Blog “Marcelo Luján builts a strong story, at times painful, with an intelligent dosage of suspense. And he also manages to prove the depth and the originality that can be found in the genre.” Horacio Convertini, Revista Ñ “A short tragedy that leaves marks and it stucks in your mind.” Natalia Calvo, Fantasymundo “Moravia is a fascinating book that stirs you up inside.” Guido Finzi, Revista Literaturas

Published by: Spanish El Aleph.

For other countries available

THRILLER

La mala espera (The wrong await) Novel. EDAF, 2009, 227 pages Prize Ciudad de Getafe for Black Novel , 2009 An Argentinian immigrant known as El Nene has spent several years in Madrid, surviving on the jobs he receives from a clandestine drug trafficking “agency”- Nene’s life takes a sudden turn when he accepts a proposal to “keep the change” from one of his riskiest drug deals, involving the transportation of pure cocaine inside the bodies of Central American children. The missing kilos of cocaine soon lead Nene into his worst nightmare. Nene decides to try his luck at exposing the heads of the agency, but what he doesn’t realize is that everyone around him is part of a complex scheme of false identities, death, survival, betrayal and thirty three years of waiting to take revenge for past wrongs.

The wrong await is not a story of revenge itself, but rather it is a portrait of all the consuming power of waiting to take revenge on your enemies.

“With this novel, Luján acquires a place of a singular value in the Spanish contemporary narrative”. Lorenzo Slva “With The wrong await, Luján gets what is most difficult for a novelist: that the reader identifies with the character to the point of feeling every punch, every doubt, every fear that happens to the protagonist. And that hurts. And creates addiction”. Carlos Salem “Marcelo Luján possesses a rich and direct language and his environments and characters are surprising”. Óscar Urra.

"La mala espera is a great short amazing novel, one of those that smells to ashtray and talks about the dark side of the being human, a well constructed story, and above all, very well narrated. High LI-TE-RA-TU-RE.” Alexis Ravelo, Ceremonias “Owner of a perfect register for the narrated story, that combines the blackest and sordidest novel, with the sensations and the experiences of the estrangement, Marcelo Luján reaches something that other authors don’t: in a first person story, full of moments where the character thinks about his situation –as a criminal, as a victim, as an immigrant- the reader never feels that he strays from the story.” Ariel Mazzeo Published by: Spanish worldwide EDAF/France Moisson Rouge For other countries available

Patricio Sturlese

Argentina, 1973 Patricio Sturlese studied theology with the Jesuit Fathers at the Colegio Máximo, San Miguel (Argentina). He has devoted himself to research on the history of the Church, the Inquisition and the heresies during the Renaissance. He has also travelled in the main places where this history takes place: medieval castles and European monasteries.

His former novels (El Inquisidor and La sexta Vía) are still bestsellers in Spain and Latin America, and they have been translated into different languages and publlished in thirty countries. .

“A worthy descendant of Alexander Dumas”. Página12, Argentina

www.sturlese.net

Works El umbral del bosque. (The threshold of the forest) Novel, 2012 La Sexta Vía. (The Sixth Way) Novel. 2009 El Inquisidor. (The Inquisitor) Novel. 2007

NOVEL

El umbral del bosque (The threshold of the forest) Novel . Suma de Letras, 2012. 496 pages The threshold of the forest is a Gothic novel. It takes place in the 18th Century, primarily in the Nordic countries. The main plot line focuses on myths about drävulia (Scandinavian vampires) and on a curse known as the “night of 400 years” which put an end to the Kingdom of Norway and its royal line.

1604, the Castle of Countess Báthory, Kingdom of Hungary.

The novel’s leading character, Captain Pier Ugo Mameli, Venetian merchant, is hired by Countess Báthory to search for a chest to be found in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and containing papers crucial for her kingdom. Mameli is to then transport it to the castle in secret.

As he is about to begin his journey, the Captain starts to have nightmares which bring back memories of incidents from his youth, nightmares which continue as he travels toward the Gobi. At the same time he begins to observe seemingly inexplicable events: banks of fog which suddenly come up at night, unidentifiable knocks on his door, the mysterious appearance of maple leaves…

The tension builds as Mameli arrives in Mongolia and succeeds in gaining possession of the chest. He sets out on the trip back to the castle in Hungary but halfway there he allows some seemingly defenseless young women on board his ship.

The ladies, members of the Nordic aristocracy start to take on more important roles on the ship and change the ship’s destination.

Beguiled by them, and particularly by Abigail von Karstein, the Captain is overcome by fear and confusion: Abigail is identical to the woman in his nightmares.

She visits him in his cabin at night. Unable to resist seduction, Mameli cannot see no boundary between what he dreams and what happens. Abigail and her companions are playing with his mind.

On board there is a series of murders which leave the victims’ bodies with strange wounds on their arms and legs. The Captain soon discovers that the beautiful women are not who they claim to be, but are in reality drävulias, Scandinavian vampires.

Impelled by the bloody murders taking place on his ship, Mameli decides to examine the chest he was bringing back for the Báthorys. Inside it he discovers a map which marks the hiding place of a book known as The Threshold of the Forest, written in the 13th Century by a Norwegian monarch. The book appears to be the cause of a secret dispute and also of a curse which attracts the drävulias, who covet it desperately.

Under siege on his own vessel, Mameli is forced by the dr채vulias to change course toward Norway so they can make off with the chest they want so much.

Indeed they do manage to carry it off but this sets off a chase which takes the story to the frozen lands of Scandinavia. The Captain must get back the chest, and following a trail that takes him through the towns and ancient cemeteries of Norway and Sweden and finally arrives at the very heart of the mystery: the discovery of The Threshold of the Forest.

The presence of Mameli and his men in the land of the dr채vulias causes confrontations among the vampires themselves who in their villages and hiding places suffer violent ambushes and ferocious attacks.

The Captain is in danger of losing not only the chest but his life, and his relationship with Abigail leaves him torn between desire and duty.

The threshold of the forest becomes a temptation for Mameli himself, who abandons his assignment and loyalty to his client and puts all his efforts into the mystery of its content.

A bloodbath brings the story to an end and the final climax is one of forbidden love marked by death.

Published by: Spanish Suma de Letras For other countries available

El Inquisidor (The Inquisitor)

NOVEL

Novel. Random House Mondadori, DeBolsilo, Spain 2007. 550 pages A furiously paced thriller set in the tumultuous late 16th century. An inquisitor is searching for the Necronomicon, a satanic book that could shake the very foundations of the Church.

An historic thriller with all the ingredients to be a huge hit: the sinister world of the Inquisition and witchcraft; a satanic book capable of bringing about the destruction of the world; an almost forbidden love; and a surprise ending.

In 1597, in the chambers of Pope Clement VIII at the Vatican, Angelo DeGrasso, Inquisitor General of Liguria, is received in private audience by the Pope, the Inquisitor General and a strange astrologer named Darko. They have just told him that a heretic named Eros Gianmaria, who has been brought from Venice, holds a terrible secret: he is the only person who knows the whereabouts of the last copy of a forbidden book, the Necronomicon and Angelo must use his skills to get a confession out of him. But there isn’t much time, since he must set out for the New World in a few days, on a mission that will not be revealed to him until he has already embarked.

Over the course of his adventure, Angelo will discover a plot of interwoven conspiracies. On one side, there is the Great Wizard’s sect that aspires to destroy Christianity, and which has held onto the book for that reason; on the other side, the Masons of Corpus Caria, a sect that is trying to recover the forbidden book and hide it from the Holy Inquisition; and on yet another side, those inside the Vatican itself, who are conspiring against Angelo because they consider him a potential heretic.

As he descends the stairs of Saint Peter’s basilica one cold autumn day, Angelo has a feeling that his life is going to change drastically. The unforgiving Inquisitor General of Genoa will not take long to discover that not even he is what he seems…

An enthralling novel that takes us to the turbulent end of the 16th century, in which the Catholic Church kills to defend the orthodoxy and maintain its power, in which covens of witches live in the Italian forests under the protection of Satan and the Moon, and in which everyone is willing to die for their faith — but which faith?

Published by: Spanish worldwide Randon House Mondadori/ Germany Hayne/ Italy Sperling/ Poland Albatros/ Russia Ripol/ Romania Rao/ Denmark Jentas.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION AVAILABLE

Inaki Echeverría

Argentina, 1974 He´s an illustrator and a cartoonist. He collaborates with publishing houses and print media in Argentina and in foreign countries.

He publishes weekly in the newspaper Página/12 and monthly in Fierro magazine.

He has participated in numerous exhibitions, «Nos tocó hacer reír», «Encuentro Federal de la Palabra» and «Buenos Aires Negra», among others.

Since 2013, in important literary events like the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, he makes murals denouncing the female sex slavery and trafficking. He also conducts «Banda viajera» at the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, where he makes live painting accompanying narrative and poetry recitals.

Works Padre Abrumado . Cartoon Beya (co-authored with Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) Eterna Cadencia, 2013). Beya received the Alfredo Palacios award from the National Senate, for its contribution to the fight against sexual trafficking. It was declared of social and cultural interest by the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires and of cultural interest by the Buenos Aires Province. It was also nominee for of the Reader´s Award for best book of the year (Buenos Aires International Book Fair, 2014).

Muffins . Graphic novel. Manoescrita, 2011 . Muffins was nominated for best Argentinian graphic novel Argentina 2011.

Negro al 10 (co-authored with Santiago Maisonnave) Manoescrita, 2010

CARTOON

Paco Gómez

Madrid 1971 Since 1996 he has worked in the world of the image and currently combines his work as a photographer with that of directing documentaries.

He curates and designs exhibitions. For nine years he worked as a printer in the Castro Prieto laboratories in Madrid where he had direct contact with the masters of Spanish photography.

He was awarded the 2001 INJUVE Photography Prize and the 2002 PhotoEspaña Prize. In addition at the 2006 PhotoEspaña he was honoured as the “up and coming photographer” and as a member of the “up and coming photography group” NOPHOTO. He currently works as a photographer at the Espacio Matadero Madrid, at the ThyssenBornemisza Museum and at Ivory Press.

He has worked as a designer of exhibitions for institutions such as Matadero Madrid, the Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development, Casa Árabe and directed the international tour of Gervasio Sánchez’ Vidas Minadas. His photographs have been published in magazines such as El País Semanal, Vanity Fair, Matador, Rolling Stone, Siete Leguas and XL Semanal.

His work as a photographer shows the clear influence of dreams, archaeology, memories, literature and film. His series of photographs question the limits of reality by using the hidden messages of the photographs and documentary research to construct stories.

His work has gradually moved away from photography, branching out into more hybrid terrains related to historical research and literature.

Los Modlin Fracaso Books, 2013. 288 pages Cuatricomia.

The story of the eccentric Modlin family—Margaret, an obsessive painter; Elmer, a supporting actor; and Nelson, the couple’s eldest child, a model, actor and radio announcer, who live in Madrid in the 1970’s—comes to an end in 2003.

The day that the last of them died someone threw all their belongings out of the window of the building at Calle del Pez 3 in central Madrid.

The story of this American family lies strewn about on the pavement: clothing, objects, letters, paintings, notebooks, and hundreds of photographs and videos, which show three people in incomprehensible poses and phantasmagorical paintings.

It was there on the pavement in Calle del Pez that the Spanish photographer Paco Gómez met this peculiar family.

This was also the beginning of the obsession of this photographer who saw in the photos his booty and wondered, as we do, Who were these people? And more importantly, “How did all this stuff end up in the rubbish?” Paco Gómez had not found a treasure; he had found an obsession.

For ten years, he tried to reconstruct the history of this family and devoted his time to investigating. He interviewed almost everyone who had had anything to do with the Modlins, visited the places where they had spent time, watched hundreds of films in which Elmer Modlin had appeared as a supporting actor, studied the paintings of his wife Margaret (the self-styled best painter of the 20th Century), entered the ruins of what had been their house.

This American family was elegant and undoubtedly eccentric. In one photo we see the father, naked, showing the camera his worn underpants, in another this man is

crucified; in yet another, we see the son, an Adonis posing with an aristocratic attitude, in another, the mother, haughty, painting a portrait of Franco The Modlin appear as extras in films during the late, less sexually repressive stage of the Spanish dictatorship, had associated with Henry Miller, travelled to the Alcarria and the villages of Extremadura, leaving their magnetic imprint on the craziest places and the most varied people. Javier Marías mentioned one of the Modlins in an article and a deaf-mute expressed his admiration for them. Agustín Fernández Mallo fantasizes about the Modlins in his book Nocilla Dream and the waitress in a traditional coffeeshop remembers them with affection. Many people had been touched by them but nobody knew quite who they were.

Paco Gómez pieces together the biography of this strange, enigmatic family and saves them for posterity as they had so much hoped to be.

An atypical book halfway between literature and photography, printed in four colours in an exquisite edition. It creates a story that is read as it is seen or is seen as it is read, in which the reader gradually becomes a spectator while generating a film in his/her mind. Text and image make up a single literary body which brings together in a natural manner such diverse literary genres as the journalistic feature, the detective-style biography, diaries, fiction and, of course, photography.

“The Modlins transmits, almost without filtering, a twofold fascination: that which emerges from the very life of the Modlins and that which Gómez experienced during his ten years of research.” Revista El Cultural.

“Lucidity and honesty, this is precisely what is extracted from this thrilling story. The book’s both literary and documentary value are the keys to the success of any good story: powerful images and the author’s commitment to the story. A real master class in the creative process for writers, photographers and filmmakers interested in the documentary genre.” Revista Más de Arte.

“Chance laid the remains of a shipwreck at Paco Gómez’ feet. Ten years later he gives them back to us with the sense that life only has when life is called a novel. This is the Modlin’s novel but also and to no lesser extent Paco Gomez’ novel.” Andres Trapiello “The Modlins is a captivating book, an important one the story of which is as noteworthy as that of its unfortunate protagonists, who experienced a calling as artists and poverty and madness and were devoured by them.” Patricio Prom “The Modlins is the absolute confirmation of the notion that reality surpasses fiction. It is one of the most captivating stories I have ever heard. Paco Gómez recovered it and recounted it to us with unquestionable skill and emotion” Agustín Fernández Mallo "A model of biography destined to become a reference." Revista Otra Parte, Argentina

Book Trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmQoLZrI_ok Research: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeccGgEMkfc Report on TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMygSzvxLJ0