Book Description
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, admired by Julio Cortázar, Roberto Bolaño, and Ricardo Piglia, who counted Di Benedetto, next to Borges, as one of the two great models of Latin American literature.
In every story, the Argentine journalist confronts bare suffering with a linguistic precision and a talent for imagery that his translator, Martina Broner, captures effortlessly...Nest in the Bones offers a whirlwind introduction to a writer whose enormous weight in Latin America is finally becoming palpable outside its borders.
— Harvard Review
Di Benedetto has written indispensable pages that have moved and continue moving me.
— Jorge Luis Borges
One of the greatest Argentinean writers and one of the greatest writers of Latin America.
— Roberto Bolaño
A page from Di Benedetto is recognizable immediately, on the very first glance – like one of Van Gogh’s paintings.
— Juan José Saer
Blends the fantastic sensibilities of Borges and Kafka with the profound pessimism of Dostoyevsky... Di Benedetto's view of the world is gloomy, his writing precise and poetic. It's a winning combination.
— Kirkus Reviews
This collection from renowned Argentinean author Di Benedetto (Zama) showcases his short stories’ development from sparse and experimental into melancholic, deeply affecting fables... These stories bolster Di Benedetto’s reputation as a visionary talent, and serve as a worthy introduction to one of Latin America’s most influential writers.
— Publishers Weekly
Di Benedetto's eloquence makes the stories in Nest in the Bones works of exquisite beauty that are hard to resist. If, like me, you had never read any of his work until now this is a perfect introduction to a great author.
— Richard Marcus, Seattle PI
Readers with a love of Latin American authors will find Di Benedetto a welcome addition to the canon that's available in English.
— Noah Cruickshank, Shelf Awareness
Di Benedetto is the rare novelist who doesn't seek to reconstruct the past to prove a point. He lives the past, and exposes us to experiences and forms of behavior that retain all their weirdness.
— Julio Cortázar
It took sixty years for Antonio Di Benedetto's novel Zama, recognized in the Spanish-speaking world as a classic, to be translated into English... The belated arrival of Zama... raises an admittedly hyperbolic question: Can it be that the Great American Novel was written by an Argentinean?
— Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker
Di Benedetto lets go of the reins of narrative logic and allows the spirit to take his hero where it will.
— J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books
Read it above all for the triumph of its style: Zama holds forth in deep, stewing paragraphs as pompous as they are incisive. It's Sartre by way of J. Peterman.
— Dan Piepenbring, Paris Review Daily
Zama has the beauty and force of a classic, but also the attributes of an overlooked masterpiece…I think that Zama should be translated into English simply because so many English-speaking readers and authors haven't read one of the best novels of the 20th century. Good books are unique and need no justification.
— Sergio Chejfec, The Quarterly Conversation
[Nest in the Bones] display[s] to perfection Di Benedetto’s intense understanding of nastiness. . . and something of the range of his experiments with strangeness. . . It’s true that many of the stories in Nest in the Bones are dark and even cruel, but there is no dogma of darkness here.
— Michael Wood, London Review of Books
