A love story, a travelogue, a collection of stories and snapshots, both visual and verbal, irreverent and brilliant.
“The journey undertaken by Cortázar and his wife and collaborator Carol Dunlop is quixotic in the largest sense. At one level, it is an adventure stood on its absurd head. At another, it is something graver—a mask of comedy concealing the enigma of an archaic smile.”
—Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease, which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder . . . and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair.”
—Pablo Neruda
“Idols invite respect, admiration, affection, and, of course, great envy. Cortázar inspired all of these feelings as very few writers can, but he inspired, above all, an emotion much rarer: devotion. He was, perhaps without trying, the Argentine who made the whole world love him.”
—Gabriel García Márquez
This unpredictable collection of reflections is peppered with quotes from French poets and American jazzmen. Bemused and melancholy, erudite and searching, this first-time English translation of Diario de Andrés Fava is full of autobiographical winks at the reader. Cortázar’s brilliance and irreverence are in full flower.
Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed.
— Pablo Neruda
Cortázar is a unique storyteller. He can induce the kind of chilling unease that strikes like a sound in the night.
— Time Magazine
[…] Indian sultan. The architectural wonder was not merely a place dedicated to astronomical observation but also a space that bore witness to the dreams of those who entered it. With a dream-logic of its own, Cortazar’s haunting photos of this enigmatic place flow into others of Paris at night which flow into his verbal dance.
[…] serious. Literature is like that—it’s a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into. One can do everything for that game. – Julio Cortázar, Argentine novelist (1914-1984), in an interview with The Paris Review Check out Cortázar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute or the brilliant Hopscotch. Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseilles Julio-Cortazar-playing-trumpet-274×300
Please join Archipelago Books on Friday, August 12, for a starry celebration of Julio Cortázar’s From the Observatory: Friday, August 126:30 p.m.Vassar College Observatory124 Raymond AvenuePoughkeepsie, NY 12604 Reception to be followed by a reading and panel discussion with translator Anne McLean, Vassar English professor and Cortázar scholar Mihai Grunfeld, and Vassar astronomy professor Fred […]
Book Review: Julio Cortazar’s From the Observatory The Wall Street Journal reviewed our latest book!
José Eduardo Agualusa’s restless protagonist, Daniel Benchimol, spends his dreaming hours interviewing revolutionaries and writers. In this treacherous sleepscape, we find the Angolan anti-communist Jonas Savimbi, Muammar Gaddafi, hunched and hiding in a gutter, and Julio Cortázar as a great billowing tree, speaking to Daniel through an alphabet of clouds. He dreams wild dreams of people he’s never met, squinting at them […]
Reminiscent of Cortázar’s Cronopios and Famas, this incandescent collection of lyrical and often nightmarish visions—now in English for the first time—is a feast for the senses and mind. At once raw, chiaroscuro, unearthly, and musical, these dreamscapes shed light on the human condition, history, isolation and connection, death and rebirth. Warning: these bite-sized pieces may […]
Antonio Di Benedetto wrote with constant poetic innovation. His genre-defying stories, often dark and unexpectedly moving, explore the space between imagination and reality, tragedy and melodrama, civilization and barbarism. Nest in the Bones attests to Di Benedetto’s mastery of the short form as well as his impressive range across genres and styles. Di Benedetto was a writer’s writer, […]
“If George Lucas were a poet, this is how he would write.” —New York Sun
“Cărtărescu’s phantasmagorical world is similar to Dalí’s dreamscapes.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Cărtărescu is] a writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few.” —Andrei Codrescu
“His novel is nothing less than a cathedral of imagination and erudition … This masterwork of mannerism is guaranteed to catapult Mircea Cartarescu to the highest echelons of European literature.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung
