Seeing double rows of elegant lime trees around the main square of his hometown of Colonel Pringles, our narrator - who could well be the author himself, although nothing is guaranteed in a book by Cesar Aira - suddenly recalls the Sunday mornings of his childhood, when his father would take him to gather the lime-flower blossoms from which he made tea. Beginning with his father, handsome and `black' and working-class, and his strikingly grotesque mother, the narrator quickly leaps from anecdote to anecdote, bringing to life his father's dream of upward mobility, the dashing of their family's hopes when the Peronist party fell from power, the single room they all shared, and his mother's litany of political rants, which were used - like the lime-flower tea - to keep his father calm. Aira's charming fictional memoir is a colourful mosaic of a small-town neighbourhood, a playful portrait of the artist as a child and an invitation to visit the source of Aira's own extraordinary imagination.

In Korea, a little Buddhist monk (really very dwarf-sized) dreams of the Western world and secretly reads up on Western culture. When he meets the holidaying French couple Napoleon Chirac and Jacqueline Bloodymary he offers his services as their guide, in the hope they will take him, a penniless monk, to Europe. He whisks them off on a tour of the temples. Among the many twists and turns, our stunned tourists encounter a suicidal horse and discover that a person can also be a robot. Though our monk appears to them as the very spirit of tourism, nothing is natural in this tour de force of Aira's twisted imagination.

Marcia is sixteen, overweight and unhappy. One day, as she's walking down a Buenos Aires street, she hears a shout: 'Wannafuck?' Startled, she turns round and is confronted by two punk girls Lenin and Mao. Soon, she's beguiled by them and the possibilities they open up. But the two have little time for a philosophical discussion of love: they need proof, and with their own savage logic the duo, calling themselves the Commando of Love, hold up a supermarket as the novel climaxes in an unforgettable splatter-fest finale.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize Shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclan prize for its translation A recently divorced man trying to enjoy himself in one of the trendier districts of Buenos Aires finds himself at the centre a series of strange coincidences. These blips in causality are at first easily rationalised, but soon escalate from the merely implausible to the impossible to the cataclysmic. More, each accident of fate, piling one atop the other, drags a new, rambling tale in its wake, until the very ground beneath the man's feet seems likely to buckle beneath the weight of so many shaggy dogs. And yet, with master storyteller Cesar Aira holding their leashes, what better vacation from reality could any reader-or divorce-desire?

It is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfold: vast chasms, surreal plants and animals… But then something goes appallingly wrong.

This is one of Aira’s great works, filled with his baffling ability to veer between grandeur and absurdity. Each page fails to provide clues as to what lies in wait for the reader on the next.

This book, published in honour of Veikko Tahka, represents the synthesis of his thinking based on more than forty years' experience as a clinician, researcher, teacher, and supervisor, concerning the nature of understanding, a debate in which the psychoanalytic model was used as an example.

This book has been published in honour of Veikko Tahka, MD, the prime founder of the Finnish Psychoanalytical Society and a central pioneer in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Finland.Veikko Tahka has published four books and over one hundred articles in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychiatry. For over half a century his interest has steadily moved towards an integrative view of the current psychoanalytic knowledge of human development and the present-day clinical expertise that would permit the use of psychoanalytic treatment as a phase-specific approach, applicable in principle to all levels of disturbed psychic development. This integrative vision became synthesized in Veikko Tahkas monumental main work Mind and Its Treatment: A Psychoanalytic Approach (1993), in which his pioneering view of a general psychoanalytic theory of normal and disturbed mental development and its phase-specific encounter was introduced in detail.Veikko Tahka received his psychoanalytic training in Stockholm in the 1950s and worked at the Austen Riggs Center from 1959 to 1961 and again from 1987 to 1989. Although his framework does not belong to any particular psychoanalytic school, he is internationally known and respected. To this end this volume contains papers by an international group of some of the most well-respected analysts who have either worked with Veikko Tahka or have been influenced by his work.Psychoanalysis keeps on evolving and rather than going over theories already vocalised, this collection of important papers introduces new ideas and theories along with valuable clinical material. The papers discuss various issues, among them important topics such as dissidence, illusion and reality in the psychoanalytic relationship, transference, unconscious fantasies, therapeutic play and developmental object in psychoanalytic treatment.Contributors: Henrik Enckell, Mikael Enckell, Terttu Eskelinen, Pere Folch, Pentti Ikonen, Otto F. Kernberg, Pearl King, Leena Klockars, Aira Laine, Johannes Lehtonen, Joyce McDougall, Eero Rechardt, Simo Salonen, Anne-Marie Sandler, Riitta Tahka, Robert S. Wallerstein, Vamik D.Volkan, Jukka Valimaki."

A certain writer ("past sixty, enjoying 'a certain renown'") strolls through the old book market in a Buenos Aires park: "My Sunday walk through the market, repeated over so many years, was part of my general fantasizing about books." Unfortunately, he is suffering from writer's block. However, that proves to be the least of our hero's problems. In the market, he fails to avoid the insufferable boor Ovando-"a complete loser" but a "man supremely full of himself: Conceit was never less justified." And yet, is Ovando a master magician? Can he turn sugar cubes into pure gold? And can our protagonist decline the offer Ovando proposes granting him absolute power if the writer never in his life reads another book? And is his publisher also a great magician? And the writer's wife? Only Cesar Aira could have cooked up this witch's potion (and only he would plop in phantom Mont Blanc pens as well as fearsome crocodiles from the banks of the Nile)-a brew bubbling over with the question: where does literature end and magic begin?

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.

Daily conversations in outdoor cafes with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera's goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, distress, and incipient madness. The two men's uneasiness soon becomes a nightmare as the TV adventure advances with a real-life plot - involving a mutant strain of killer algae - to take over the world! The Conversations, a reality within a fiction within a parallel reality, is hilariously funny and surprisingly touching.

"On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course." - from Ghosts Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter's life hangs in the balance.

The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility, and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere. As Nicholas Lemann put it in The New Yorker, "Krech is more than just a conventional-wisdom overturner; he has a serious larger point to make. . . . Concepts like ecology, waste, preservation, and even the natural (as distinct from human) world are entirely anachronistic when applied to Indians in the days before the European settlement of North America." "Offers a more complex portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to embrace."-Washington Post "My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention. A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.

Life is a Journey and if you pay attention you can learn more from observation than any other form of learning. This book is a journey into the lessons learned by the author through experience and observation. Although the focus audience is single women any person in any stage of life can apply the information gathered in these pages to every kind of relationship one can encounter in life. The most important relationship any person can enter into is one with God and when that relationship is on a firm foundation every other relationship will be smooth sailing even with bumps in the road.

"Somewhere" is an inspiring fantasy adventure for the child inside everyone . The story transports us to a place beyond reality deep into the realm of the mind of eleven-year-old Izzi, an inner city boy with a talent for writing. He lives in a small apartment with his parents who struggle to put food on the table. Faced with the sudden death of his father, Izzi retreats into his inner world for answers and embarks on a quest "looking for love" to find hope after his tragic loss.

Slim is a homeless old timer who still loves life. He lies helpless under an apple tree when he notices a young man sitting next to him. The stranger has an air of joy and purity about him that accompanies an off season scent of apple blossoms. This peculiar fellow with no name has no recollection of his identity or the world around him. So Slim tells him to pick a name and after giving him a few tips sends him off pointing out that in this life "you have to be somebody." And so "Apple," as he calls himself, departs into a brand new world. On his journey he soon discovers human beings are amazing creatures capable of making their dreams come true and starts wondering who dreamed him. What follows is a wondrous trek through the nature of what makes us human in search of the one who dreamed us. "The Dreamer" is an imaginative and inspirational fable that delivers the reader a sense of belonging to the universal dream we call life.