The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine

Mario Levrero, Annie McDermott (Translator), Kit Schluter (Translator)

$19.95

Publication Date: October 15th, 2024

Publisher:

And Other Stories

ISBN:

9781916751064

Pages:

128

Description

Widely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th-century Uruguay, 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 first book of stories. It gathers a variety of Levrero's earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro-fictions la Donald Barthelme, to adventurous Lewis Carroll-esque tales of forty pages' length.
From the shocking surreal twists of 'Street of the Beggars' to the Escher-like grammatical maze of 'The Boarding House' to 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.

About the Author

Mario Levrero was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1940 and died there in 2004. Levrero was a photographer, bookseller, comics scriptwriter, humorist, crossword author, and creator of brain games. He wrote twelve novels and several short story collections and it was not long before he gained cult status amongst readers in Uruguay and Argentina, despite keeping a low profile. He has inspired Latin American writers such as Rodolfo Fogwill, César Aira and Alejandro Zambra. In 2000 he was awarded the Guggenheim grant that allowed him to complete work on The Luminous Novel, which was published posthumously.