Product details
Biographical note
Levrero was a photographer, bookseller, comics scriptwriter, humourist, crossword author, and creator of brain games, and a novelist who gained cult status in Latin America. In 2000 he was awarded the Guggenheim grant that allowed him to complete work on The Luminous Novel, which was published posthumously. Annie McDermott’s translations include Mario Levrero’s Empty Words and The Luminous Novel for And Other Stories, as well as Loop by Brenda Lozano, Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz (co-translation with Carolina Orloff) and City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão (co-translation with Jethro Soutar). She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, and is now based in London.Levrero’s writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination, and nowhere more so than in this 1970 story collection. From the Escher-like grammatical maze of ‘The Boarding House’ to the Lewis Carroll-esque ‘The Basement’, this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.
‘Stories that play with space, an absurd space when looked at with logic. And that is exactly the challenge that Levrero sets the reader: to read from their imagination, from that place where anything is possible, where fears, phobias and obsessions have free rein.’ Tati Jurado
Levrero’s writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination, and nowhere more so than in this 1970 story collection. From the Escher-like grammatical maze of ‘The Boarding House’ to the Lewis Carroll-esque ‘The Basement’, this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.
‘Stories that play with space, an absurd space when looked at with logic. And that is exactly the challenge that Levrero sets the reader: to read from their imagination, from that place where anything is possible, where fears, phobias and obsessions have free rein.’ Tati Jurado
‘And that is exactly the challenge that Levrero sets the reader: to read from their imagination, from that place where anything is possible, where fears, phobias and obsessions have free rein.’ Tati Jurado