Bargains! PROMOTIONS
Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but began writing in Buenos Aires in the late 1930s. He published short stories in La Naci n and in the magazine Sur, founded by Victoria Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges. He then proceeded to write novels centered around the imaginary town of Santa Maria, which he described through complex, poetic, and existentialist prose in Los Astilleros, Juntacadaveres, and La vida breve. Due to Argentina's military dictatorship, he was exiled to Spain in 1976, where he worked as a writer for El Pais and several Latin American newspapers. His lyrical stories and compact novels awarded him the Cervantes Prize in 1980 and the Rod Prize in 1991. About the translator- Katherine Silver has translated more than thirty books, mostly of literature from the Americas. Her translations include works by Maria Sonia Cristoff, Julio Ram n Ribeyro, Julio Cortazar, Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Cesar Aira, and Pedro Lemebel. She has received numerous awards and prizes, including three National Endowment of the Arts translation fellowships. She was recently translator-in-residence at the University of Iowa, and is the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.
- Onetti had the strange quality of being inimitable and at the same time creating an entire school of writing. All of his descendants, myself included, received from him a lesson on narrative intelligence, on wise construction, on an immense love to literary imagination, on risk and irony. - Carlos Fuentes - Onetti is the first modern writer in our language...His world is a dark one, highly pessimistic, with a vision of the human condition that is profoundly desperate, and which we would reject if it didn't reach us with such a wonderful language...I can assure you that, without the great books that I've read, among which I can count Onetti's books, my life would have been infinitely poorer. - Mario Vargas Llosa - Onetti is an epiphany, a celebration of beauty, of emotion and tenderness. - Antonio Mu z Molina - Onetti's writing is so good, a mere sentence by him will give you goosebumps. If I had to sell my soul to the devil in order to write a sentence in Spanish like someone else, I would think about very few authors: Borges, Onetti. - Carlos Gamerro - Onetti's writing knew that literature is creation, that creation is reality and not repetition or recreation, that it is about finding a good story to tell and then tell it beautifully. - Carlos Liscano
