Description

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Philosophically engaged and darkly moving, the twenty stories in Nest in the Bones span three decades from Antonio di Benedetto's wildly various career. From his youth in Argentina to his exile in Spain after enduring imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorship during the so-called "dirty war" to his return in the 1980s, Benedetto's kinetic stories move effortlessly between genres, examining civilization's subtle but violent imprint on human consciousness. A late-twentieth century master of the short form and revered by his contemporaries, Nest in the Bones is the first comprehensive volume of Benedetto's stories available in English.

About the Author

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ANTONIO DI BENEDETTO (1922-1986) was an Argentine journalist and author of five novels. Admired by Ricardo Piglia, Julio Cortázar and Roberto Bolaño, who not only referenced Di Benedetto in his work, but also fictionalized his friendship with him in his story, "Sensini." His life was marked by exile, as he had to leave Argentina during the so-called Dirty War. Since his death, his work has garnered much acclaim, and he has come to be recognized as one of the most important Latin American writers of the twentieth century.

About the translator: MARTINA BRONER has previously translated the work of Prince of Asturias Award recipient Antonio Muñoz Molina, including his piece "The Lighthouse at the End of the Hudson," for The Hudson Review. She has published two books of fiction, Abundancia de cielo (DíazGrey Editores) and El ruido de la fiesta (Mancha de Aceite). She has received the Tribeca Film Institute's Voces award, the Austin Film Festival Award, and the Zaki Gordon Award for Excellence in Screenwriting. Broner holds an M.F.A. in Film from Columbia University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish from NYU. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature and Culture at Cornell University.

Praise For…

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"This collection from renowned Argentinean author Di Benedetto (Zama) showcases his short stories’ development from sparse and experimental into melancholic, deeply affecting fables... These stories bolster Di Benedetto’s reputation as a visionary talent, and serve as a worthy introduction to one of Latin America’s most influential writers." — Publishers Weekly

"[B]lends the fantastic sensibilities of Borges and Kafka with the profound pessimism of Dostoyevsky... Di Benedetto's view of the world is gloomy, his writing precise and poetic. It's a winning combination." — Kirkus Reviews

"an impressive swath of subjects, emotions and perspectives. . . Readers with a love of Latin American authors will find Di Benedetto a welcome addition to the canon that's available in English." — Noah Cruickshank, the Field Museum, in Shelf Awareness

"In every story, the Argentine journalist confronts bare suffering with a linguistic precision and a talent for imagery that his translator, Martina Broner, captures effortlessly... Nest in the Bones offers a whirlwind introduction to a writer whose enormous weight in Latin America is finally becoming palpable outside its borders." — Harvard Review

"Very well translated... displays to perfection...the range of [Di Benedetto’s] experiments with strangeness...Di Benedetto’s characters, with their ‘secret wounds, their isolation and their irony, and above all their lightly masochistic self-irony,’ are companions of those of Svevo, Pessoa and Kafka." — London Review of Books

"[NEST IN THE BONES is] a sampling of the Argentine’s short fiction... demonstrating an extraordinary experimental and emotional range that Zama—largely confined as it is to the perspective of a single self-centered narrator—could only hint at." — Public Books

"Di Benedetto has written indispensable pages that have moved and continue moving me." — Jorge Luis Borges

"One of the greatest Argentinean writers and one of the greatest writers of Latin America." — Roberto Bolaño