Barbara Epler on César Aira
(Hand lettering by Joel Holland)
In tandem with publishing a César Aira story entitled "Picasso," The New Yorker has a little interview of the international-lit juggernaut Barbara Epler this week. It's always refreshing to see some Aira float to the top of the cultural conversation--same with New Directions. There's a nice aside in the interview in which Epler talks about meeting Aira on a trip to Argentina, with characteristically Airan results:
For several weeks, he’d ignored my e-mails from New York asking if I could see him, until the morning I was flying off, when a brief note appeared—“I love all my publishers a priori”—saying that he’d pick me up at my hotel the next morning and show me the town. He ran me through three museums in ninety minutes: it was the White Rabbit tour. When we finally sat down and I could have a beer, I tried to talk to him about his own books, which turned out to be a dreadful idea. We only started enjoying ourselves when he told me that his favorite English-language author is Muriel Spark.
"Flight forward," indeed. A collection of Aira's short stories entitled "The Musical Brain and Other Stories" is due out by ND next year. Check out the title story, also published in The New Yorker in 2011.
-Hal-
