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Ghosts, by César Aira

Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

The most unsettling and stunning of Aira’s short novels published so far by New Directions.

“Once you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop.” —Roberto Bolaño

“Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W.G. Sebald, those great late modernists for whom fiction was a theater of ideas.” —Mark Doty, Los Angeles Times

“Utterly astonishing.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“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.” © 2009 Aira & Andrews

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.

César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967.

Also by Aira from ND: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, ISBN 978-0-8112-1630-2 and How I Became a Nun, ISBN 978-0-8112-1631-9