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Biography
Argentine

César Aira

1949

The most prolific and unpredictable Argentine writer since Borges, César Aira has published over 100 novellas — most under 100 pages — that combine avant-garde experimentalism with deadpan humour, narrative delirium, and a method he calls 'la huida hacia adelante' (the flight forward): never revising, never looking back, following each narrative wherever its logic leads, no matter how absurd. His work defies genre, category, and expectation — a novella may begin as realist fiction and end as science fiction, fairy tale, or philosophical treatise, sometimes within a single paragraph.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityArgentine
1. Biography

A short life of the author

César Aira (b. 1949) was born on 23 February 1949 in Coronel Pringles, a small town in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. He moved to Buenos Aires in 1967 and has lived there since, writing prolifically while teaching at the University of Buenos Aires. He has translated Rimbaud, the Brontës, and other writers from French, English, and Italian.

Life and Career

Aira’s method is unique in contemporary literature. He writes in cafés, a few pages at a time, and never revises. Each novella begins with a situation — often banal, sometimes absurd — and develops through improvisation. When the narrative reaches a crisis, Aira resolves it through what he calls a fuga hacia adelante: a wild, often surreal leap that transforms the story entirely. This method produces works of astonishing variety and occasional failure, which Aira accepts as part of the process.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000, English translation 2006) — about the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas travelling through Argentina and being struck by lightning — is his most acclaimed work: a novella of devastating beauty about art, perception, and physical suffering. Ghosts (1990/2009) — set in an unfinished Buenos Aires apartment building where the future tenants encounter naked ghosts on New Year’s Eve — is equally brilliant.

How I Became a Nun (1993/2007) — narrated by a six-year-old child (whose gender shifts) in Rosario — is a story about ice cream, death, and narrative unreliability. The Literary Conference (2006/2010) — about a writer who plans to clone Carlos Fuentes — is his funniest work. The Seamstress and the Wind (1994/2011) is his most formally daring.

Aira has published over 100 books. New Directions publishes his English translations in the US; they are among the press’s bestselling titles.

Major Works and Themes

Aira’s fiction is about fiction itself — the act of narration, the contract between writer and reader, and what happens when that contract is violated. His novellas are thought experiments about storytelling conducted in real time. He is the anti-perfectionist: where Borges polished each sentence to diamond hardness, Aira lets his sentences sprawl and his plots careen.

Key Works

  • An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000)
  • Ghosts (1990)
  • How I Became a Nun (1993)
  • The Literary Conference (2006)

Collecting Aira

Argentine first editions (Emecé, Beatriz Viterbo, Mansalva) are abundant and inexpensive — Aira publishes so prolifically that scarcity is rare. New Directions paperback firsts bring $10–$30.

Early editions — Ema, la cautiva (1981), La luz argentina (1983) — are scarce in fine condition.