Target in the Night

Ricardo Piglia, one of the most prominent authors of the entire Spanish-language world, was born in Buenos Aires in 1940 and grew up on Mar del Plata. He studied at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata where he majored in history and graduated in 1965. Early in his career, Piglia was connected to the important literary and political magazine Los Libros (1968-1974) and in 1968 began the publication of his first edited collection of detective novels: La Serie Negra. Piglia also established himself as a writer of short stores and was the recipient of distinguished awards. His fiction grapples with the meaning of social and political processes as is evident in the stories collected in the volume Assumed Name, published in English in 1995. Two of his books (Assumed Name and Plata quemada) have inspired films. His novel La ciudad ausente was adapted for opera and shown at The Colon Opera House of Buenos Aires, with music by Gerardo Gandini. He received innumerable prizes for his works and for his lifetime's body of literature, including the Casa de las Americas Prize for La invasion, the Boris Vian Prize for Artificial Resperation, the Nacional Prize for La ciudad ausente, the Planeta Prize for Plata quemada, the Premio Iberoamericano de las Letras Jose Donoso, and for Target in the Night the Romulo Gallegos Prize and the National Critics Prize. A literary critic, essayist, and professor, Piglia taught for several decades at American universities, including at Princeton for fifteen years. As professor, Piglia teaches Spanish American Literature, with special emphasis on 19th and 20th centuries intellectual and cultural history in the Rio de la Plata. Interested in literary theory and theory of the novel he has given seminars about Sarmiento, Onetti, Borges, Arlt, Puig, as well as on "Paranoid fiction. The detective genre in Latin American" and "Poetics of the novel in Latin America. He currently holds the Walter S. Carpenter Professor of Language, Literature and Civilization of Spain at Princeton. Sergio Waisman is Professor of Spanish and International Affairs at The George Washington University, where he has been teaching since 2003. He is also Affiliated Faculty of Judaic Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley (2000), and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1995). Prof. Waisman's book Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery was published in the US by Bucknell and in Argentina by Adriana Hidalgo (both in 2005). Sergio Waisman has translated six books of Latin American literature, including The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia (Duke Univ. Press), for which he received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award in 2000. His first novel, Leaving, was published in the U.S. in 2004 (Intelibooks), and in 2010 as Irse in Argentina (bajo la luna). His latest translations are The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela (2008, Penguin Classics) and An Anthology of Spanish-American Modernismo (2007, MLA, with Kelly Washbourne).

"Piglia's postmodern, brainy and sometimes funny take on the detective thriller, and it's an absolute joy to read ... nothing in Target in the Night is anything less than original -- it works both as a clever detective novel and a surprising meditation on the complications of families and the way justice works in the modern world." -- Michael Schaub, NPR "Piglia is a talented storyteller and this is a compelling potboiler, but it's less Agatha Christie and more a tale about the transformation of the Argentine pampas. Piglia opens a window into a fascinating world, leaving the reader hungry for more." -- Publishers Weekly "A paranoid marvel ... unlike any detective novel you've read ... Target in the Night challenges the philosophical merit of a story whose mysteries can be succinctly concluded. It posits that a fear of death, and a fear of embracing a world where hard truth and meaning are nothing more than abstract, idealistic concepts, propels us to reconstruct the past and impose them where they don't exist, warping that past beyond recognition. Reality cannot be conformed to an easy, coherent narrative, and the more we try, the further submerged into darkness we become." -- Caroline North, Dallas Observer "Target in the Night is as much a historical novel as it is a detective novel; the author uses genre as a convenient package from which to break into a conversation about pressing matters of today." -- Olga Zilberbourg, The Common "Everything I want detective novels to be but rarely are -- paranoid, surreal, cynical, philosophical, but, above all, entertaining. Piglia's world is fully formed and constantly peeling back layers of complexity and intrigue. My favorite book of 2015." -- Justin Souther, Malaprop's Bookstore & Cafe (Asheville, NC) "Weird detective novel from South America with a Dupinian detective and a slippery sense of identity and community. Sign me up! So far I'm reminded of Where There's Love, There's Hate, the moments of sustained "sanity" in some of Cesar Aira work, and the more detective-y mytery-y sections of If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. Another weird, awesome book from Deep Vellum." -- Josh Cook, Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA) "A richly nuanced and sometimes adventurous novel. Piglia's novel roams through discussion on philosophy, the Jungian analysis of dreams, and the nature of freedom, but hardly a page goes by without some subtle commentary or analysis of the recent history of Argentina, where "there are no values left, only prices." In Piglia's Argentina, corruption has twisted the rules of the game so that only the innocent and the idealists are doomed." -- Terry Pitts, Vertigo "If you love paranoid pomo detective novels about neoliberal dictatorship in the Southern Cone, try Ricardo Piglia's Target in the Night." -- Aaron Bady "With a rich cast of enigmatic and colorful characters, Piglia's tale simmers with intrigue and thrilling subtlety... effortlessly blends the best elements of both literary and detective fiction. with measured plotting and a carefully constructed narrative (and a jungian dream machine!), Piglia adeptly uses his characters to reveal multiple perspectives - deftly playing their motivations and assumptions against one another." -- Jeremy Garber, bookseller, Powell's Books (Portland, OR)