Böcker av Mario Levrero

Widely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th-century Latin America, Mario Levrero's writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination. In none other of the author's books is this imagination so clearly on display as in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, his 1970 debut collection of stories. It gathers a variety of Levrero's earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro-fictions à la Donald Barthelme to adventurous Lewis Carroll-esque tales of forty pages' length. From the shocking surreal twists of 'Beggar Street' to the Escher-like grammatical maze of 'The Boarding House', via the pseudo-fairy tale classic 'The Basement', this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.

A buoyant account of the nightly tug-of-war between a sleepy father and his son, and the richly imaginative "sleepy stories" they createEach story told in Sleepy Stories drifts deeper into a beguiling dream world, telling of an elastic gentleman who stretches his body across town to effortlessly slip into bed, or of another sleepy young man who curls inside an upside-down umbrella to take a snooze. In Diego Bianki's magical universe, the waking world is made small (a French press and a red top hat shrink before our eyes), while the dream world Levrero and his son Nicolás build together (a land of sly frogs, giant apes, and smiling squids) waltzes across the page. On the last of Bianki's whimsical illustrations, Nicolás holds the book over his father's nodding head and says, "Another." This is a book to giggle with and curl up with, to take on every sleepy adventure.

Levrero's touching and funny magnum opus about domestic life, the writing process, love, the fear of death, pets, and a funereal pigeon

The amusing reflections and touching anecdotes of a writer whose journey of self-improvement begins with the basics: improving his handwriting.