City of Rats

Reviews

"The greatest miniaturist of our age, Copi was a man of the Baroque, a Shakespeare, magically reincarnated in gay Paris." — César Aira

"With his rotating cast of invalids, cripples, and colorful outcasts, Copi unfolds an iconoclast’s impudence, and stakes everything on a saturation of buffoonery, on a truly electrifying extremism. Every work by Copi is an earthquake. In Copi, eschatology transforms into a diabolical Venetian Carnival." — Clarín

"Copi’s work is intensely political, comic, fast-paced, joyful and dark, but it’s nearly impossible to fit it into a tradition or activist project because it disrupts everything: ideology, icons, genders, languages." — La Nación

"Copi and his works outraged French critics: reviewing Eva Perón, conservative newspaper Le Figaro called him ‘sinister, inept, indecent, odious, nauseating and dishonest.’" — The New Statesman

"Copi's tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outré adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is radiant detail and joyous destructive energy." — Robert Glück

"Copi's casual ease with instability is the mark of his true genius: nothing, truly nothing, is safe from his destructive wonder, and what follows the demolition is only more astonishing." — Federico Perelmuter, Southwest Review

"In my life, there is a before and after Copi." — Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

"City of Rats is, all at once, a dream—of Gombrowicz, of Macedonio Fernández—Rataouille, a comic book, and an epistolary novel co-authored by Flaubert and George Sand. Copi was an exile in the absolute sense: exiled from all of society, cast out from language and into the translation of translation. He lays claim to the dregs and dares to scorn both morality and law." — Ariana Harwicz