The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira
2 November 2012
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
Aira's latest concerns a reluctant but powerful doctor who finally decides to use his healing powers to help a hopeless patient.
César Aira’s newest novel in English is not about a conventional doctor. Single,in his forties, and poor, Dr. Aira is a skeptic. His personality — his weaknesses,whims, and pet peeves — is summed up in a series of digressions and regressions but he has a very special gift for miracles. He no longer cares about miracles,however, and has no faith in them. Perhaps he is even a little ashamed about his supernatural powers. Such is Dr. Aira, who also has to confront his arch-enemy— chief of the Piñero Hospital, Dr. Actyn — who is constantly trying to prove that Dr. Aira is a charlatan. Poor Dr. Aira is indeed a worker of miracles, but César Aira — the magesterial author — sends the very human doctor stumbling toward the biggest trap of all, in this magical book.
Reviews
"Aira's literary significance, like that of many other science fiction writers, comes from how he pushes us to question the porous line between fact and fantasy, to see it not only as malleable in history, but also blurred in the everyday. The engrossing power of his work, though, comes from how he carries out these feats: with the inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after imaginary enemies in the park." — Los Angeles Review of Books
"César Aira's is a fine short book, imaginative and entertaining, but finally and essentially, it's not about the size, it's about the transmogrified truths, the art of the prose and its necessity." — Bookslut
"César Aira’s novels are the narrative equivalent of the Exquisite Corpse, that Surrealist parlor game in which players add to drawings or stories without knowledge of previous or subsequent additions. Wildly heterogeneous elements are thrown together, and the final result never fails to surprise and amuse." — The Millions
Also By: César Aira
César Aira, Katherine Silver
Paperback, 2024
Oddly twinned masterpieces by one of the greatest fabulists of any age: past, present, or 40,000 years in the future
César Aira, Chris Andrews
Paperback, 2023
Aira holds a fun-house mirror up to the genre of historical fiction in this novel about an aging Roman general on what may be his last campaign into the provinces.
César Aira, Chris Andrews
Hardback, 2022
A writer is offered a devil’s bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?
César Aira, Chris Andrews
E Book, 2022
A writer is offered a devil’s bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?
César Aira, Chris Andrews, Patti Smith
Paperback, 2021
With a preface by the irrepressible Patti Smith, The Divorce is a delightful book of several short amazing stories of chance meetings, bizarre circumstances, and even stranger visions of alternate...
Also By: Katherine Silver
César Aira, Katherine Silver
Paperback, 2024
Oddly twinned masterpieces by one of the greatest fabulists of any age: past, present, or 40,000 years in the future
Jose Emilio Pacheco, Katherine Silver
Paperback, 2021
This heart-breaking novella is a key work of 20th-century dystopian Mexican literature and sadly all too apropos today
Jose Emilio Pacheco, Katherine Silver
E Book, 2021
This heart-breaking novella is a key work of 20th-century dystopian Mexican literature and sadly all too apropos today
César Aira, Katherine Silver
Paperback, 2020
One man’s obsession with Artforum magazine takes us on a hilarious journey to the ultimate meaning of the very creation of art
César Aira, Katherine Silver
E Book, 2020
One man’s obsession with Artforum magazine takes us on a hilarious journey to the ultimate meaning of the very creation of art