Anne McLean
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"It is 2001, and inflation is spiraling out of control in Argentina as Bruno Cadogan, an American graduate student specializing in Borges, arrives in Buenos Aires. Cadogan is on the trail of Julio Martel, an elusive tango singer rumored to be even better than Carlos Gardel, the greatest singer of the 1920s and?30s. Martel has never recorded and his strange, powerful performances, at seemingly arbitrary sites around the city, are always unannounced....
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"A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, bestselling author Juan Gabriel Vasquez. The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence -- sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing--but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire, and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces. A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside...
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A tale inspired by Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo" follows the story of Colombian-born José Altamirano, who reveals his integral role in the classic's writing and who pens his own version of events against a backdrop of a flourishing twentieth-century London and lawless Panama.
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A puzzling phone call shatters a writer's routine. An enigmatic female voice extends a dinner invitation, and it soon becomes clear that this is an invitation to take part in the documenta, the legendary exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany. The writer's mission will be to sit down to write every morning in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town, transforming himself into a living art installation. Once in...
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An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short history of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of "portable literature." In this rollicking, intellectually playful book, the society's members include writers and artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico García Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The Shandies meet in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature...