Andrés Neuman - Böcker

A dizzying, fast-paced tour of Latin America provides one of the Spanish-speaking world's most outstanding writers with the occasion for an experimental travelogue somewhere between personal diary and critical essay. Lamenting not having more time to get to know each of the 19 countries he visits after winning the Premio Alfaguara, Andres Neuman concludes that world travel consists mostly of 'not seeing'. Turning the fleeting nature of his trip into a creative and critical advantage, he writes a work that is whimsical and fun, poetic and aphoristic.

Taut and contemplative, these poems ruminate on family, exile, love, and the vagaries of human perception.Love Training encapsulates Andrés Neuman’s work as a poet, spanning two decades in a single unified collection. The book is divided into three sections that complement and respond to each other. The first, “Love Training,” focuses on family, loss, relationships, desire, and a sense of anchoring in the world. The second, “Fictions of Sight,” is concerned with questions of perception, perspective, language and creativity. The third, “I Don’t Know Why,” is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions, serving as a kind of coda.While Andrés Neuman is a rightly celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucid—and quite prolific—poet. Love Training is the first volume to make his sensitive, incisive poems available in English.

Inspired by Borges and Cortázar, and echoing Vila Matas and Zarraluki, Neuman regards both life and literature's big subjects - identity, relationships, guilt and innocence, the survival of extreme circumstances, creativity and language - with a quizzical, philosophical eye. Shining from the page with both irony and mortal seriousness, these often tragicomic 'stories of ideas' vacillate between the touching and the absurd, in the best tradition of Spanish storytelling.This is the first ever English collection of Andrés Neuman's short fiction, containing thirty-five short stories and four sets of 'Twelve Rules for a Storyteller'.Andrés Neuman was born in Buenos Aires in 1977, and grew up and lives in Spain. The son of Argentinian émigré musicians, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays and poetry collections. Pushkin Press also publishes his novels Talking to Ourselves and Traveller of the Century, which was awarded the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

A survivor of the atomic bombs dropped in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Mr Watanabe has evaded the memory for most of his nomadic life. When the 2011 earthquake strikes, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the past becomes the present, and Mr Watanabe begins a journey that will change everything. Written with intimacy and compassion, Fracture is a remarkable novel about collective trauma, love and the complexities of human life.

Shortlisted for the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

A novel of philosophy and love, politics and waltzes, history and the here-and-now, Andrés Neuman's Traveller of the Century is a journey into the soul of Europe, penned by one of the most exciting South-American writers of our time.

'Every year hundreds of books are published but rarely comes a book that reminds us of why we loved reading in the first place, that innermost quest for words and dreams. Traveller of the Century is a literary gem' Elif Shafak

A traveller stops off for the night in the mysterious city of Wandernburg. He intends to leave the following day, but the city begins to ensnare him with its strange, shifting geography.

When Hans befriends an old organ grinder, and falls in love with Sophie, the daughter of a local merchant, he finds it impossible to leave. Through a series of memorable encounters with starkly different characters, Neuman takes the reader on a hypothetical journey back into post-Napoleonic Europe, subtly evoking its parallels with our modern era.At the heart of the novel lies the love story between Sophie and Hans. They are both translators, and between dictionaries and bed, bed and dictionaries,they gradually build up their own fragile common language. Through their relationship Neuman explores the idea that all love is an act of translation, and that all translation is an act of love.

'A beautiful, accomplished novel: as ambitious as it is generous, as moving as it is smart' — Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Guardian

A big, utterly captivating murder mystery and love story, full of history and politics and the hottest sex in contemporary fiction

— Daily Telegraph

'A thought-provoking historical romance, in which sex and philosophy mingle to delightful effect.'— Ángel Gurría Quintana, Financial Times, Best Books of 2012

Novel of the century

— Lawrence Norfolk

Andrés Neuman (b.1977) was born in Buenos Aires and later moved to Granada, Spain. Selected as one of Granta magazine's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists, Neuman was included in the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 list. He has published numerous novels, short stories, essays and poetry collections. He received the Hiperión Prize for Poetry for El tobogán, and Traveller of the Century won the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize in 2009.