Chloe Aridjis – författare

'One of our boldest writers' Deborah LevyA magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality.Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.‘One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today’ Garth Greenwell‘The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s’ Zadie Smith‘A subtle and courageous writer’ Ali Smith‘Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange’ TLS

Tatiana, a young Mexican woman, is adrift in Berlin. Choosing a life of solitude, she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive Doktor Weiss. Through him she meets 'ant illustrator turned meteorologist' Jonas, a Berliner who has used clouds and the sky's constant shape-shifting as his escape from reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begins to change...

Marie’s job as a museum guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belie their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the warder who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery’s masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn apart.

Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award'A mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness... For my money, Chloe Aridjis is one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth GreenwellOne autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with the reckless, impulsive Tomás, a boy she barely knows. Their quest: to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped a touring circus.Together they head for Zipolite, the ‘Beach of the Dead’, a community peopled by hippies, nudists, beach combers and eccentric storytellers, and Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will ‘promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery’. But as Luisa wanders the shoreline, she begins to discover that a quest is more easily envisioned than accomplished.'Destined to be a classic: a richly imaginative, reflective and entracing novel' Xiaolu Guo

'One of our boldest writers' Deborah LevyA magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality.Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.‘One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today’ Garth Greenwell‘The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s’ Zadie Smith‘A subtle and courageous writer’ Ali Smith‘Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange’ TLS

The first book to focus on Dame Paula Rego’s little-known monumental triptych, Crivelli’s Garden, featuring an original short story by novelist Chloe Aridjis, new photography, and an art historical essayDame Paula Rego RA (1935–2022) was a British-Portuguese artist whose large-scale figurative paintings explored human relationships and the experience of women through compelling, often subversive compositions. Inspired by the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s altarpiece La Madonna della Rondine (after 1490), Rego produced Crivelli’s Garden in 1990−91 while she was artist in residence at the National Gallery. This monumental triptych reimagined the site of Crivelli’s panel as a radical space populated by female figures from myth, folklore, and the Bible, alongside animals drawn from Aesop’s fables and other classical texts. Literature was a major influence on Rego’s practice throughout her career: this publication in turn celebrates the far-reaching influence of Rego’s paintings with an original short story by Mexican novelist Chloe Aridjis, inspired by Rego’s triptych. Illustrated with previously unpublished preparatory drawings and newly photographed details of the painting, the book also features an art historical essay on the work.Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The National Gallery, London;(July 20–October 29, 2023)

Simon Moretti is known for his enigmatic exhibition works, presenting displays that engage with questions of agency, temporality, automatism, desire and masculinity. Incorporating appropriated images and archives as well as curatorial and publishing projects, often made in collaboration with other artists, his work addresses the role of ‘curating as practice’.Presented as a non-chronological visual essay, this publication surveys 10 years of collage works by Moretti. It includes text contributions from writer Craig Burnett, curator and art historian Yuval Etgar, novelists Deborah Levy and Chloe Aridjis, and a conversation with Andrew Durbin, editor-in-chief of frieze magazine.

REVISED & EXPANDED 2nd EDITIONRenowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis crosses borders in her work as much as she traverses them in life. Now, collected here for the first time, her stories, essays and pen portraits reveal an author as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction.At once fabular and formally innovative, acquainted with reverie and rigorous report, sensitive to the needs of a wider ecology yet familiar with the landscapes of the unconscious, her texts are both dream dispatches and wayward word plays infused with the pleasure and possibilities of language. Conversations with the presences who dwell on the threshold of waking and reverie, flâneuses of the dusk and dawn, these pieces will stay with you long after the lamps have flickered out.

Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award'A mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness... For my money, Chloe Aridjis is one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth GreenwellOne autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with the reckless, impulsive Tomás, a boy she barely knows. Their quest: to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped a touring circus.Together they head for Zipolite, the ‘Beach of the Dead’, a community peopled by hippies, nudists, beach combers and eccentric storytellers, and Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will ‘promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery’. But as Luisa wanders the shoreline, she begins to discover that a quest is more easily envisioned than accomplished.'Destined to be a classic: a richly imaginative, reflective and entracing novel' Xiaolu Guo