Julio Cortázar – författare

Hoppa hage har hyllats som ett av 1900-talets stora romantekniska experiment. Det är en bok som kan bli två, om man väljer att följa den alternativa läsplanen. Men först och främst är det en storslagen kärleksroman som utspelar sig under sent femtiotal, existentialismens, bohemernas och jazzens decennium. Huvudpersonen Horacio Oliveira är en vinddriven argentinsk intellektuell som söker meningen med livet vid kaféborden i Paris. Där möter han den trolska Maga från Uruguay. Tragiska omständigheter skiljer dem åt, Maga försvinner utan spår och Oliveira söker sig tillbaka till Latinamerika för att leta efter henne.JULIO CORTÁZAR [1914 1984] är en av det förra seklets största och mest älskade författare. Han har haft en oöverskådlig betydelse för utvecklingen av den moderna latinamerikanska prosan.»Den som inte läser Cortázar är fördömd. Att inte läsa honom är en allvarlig, osynlig sjukdom som med tiden kan få fruktansvärda följder. Något i stil med en man som aldrig har smakat persikor. I tysthet skulle han bli allt sorgsnare... och antagligen skulle han så småningom tappa håret.« PABLO NERUDA

Oliveira wants certainty. Living in Paris, he gets jazz, love and beautiful disorder. Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece, the forerunner of the Latin Boom in the 1960s, is published in Vintage Classics for the first time. Dazed by the disappearance of his muse, Argentinian writer Horatio Oliveira wanders the bridges of Paris while jazz, literature, life and art echo around him. A chance encounter with a literary idol and his new work, a novel that can be read in random order, sends Horatio’s mind into further confusion. As a return to Buenos Aires beckons, Horatio’s friend and fellow artist, Traveler, awaits his arrival with dread. Their lives are ready to play out in an inexhaustible game of indeterminacy. Hopscotch is a landmark Latin American literary novel about art, exile, love, form and uncertainty. Experimental, restless and intellectually alive, it remains one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction. 'Cortazar's masterpiece. This is the first great novel of Spanish America... A powerful anti-novel but, like deeply understood moments in life itself, rich with many kinds of potential meanings and intimations' Times Literary Supplement

»Dessa absurda små historier är om möjligt ännu underbarare än jag kunnat föreställa mig. Det är faktiskt obeskrivligt befriande.« JENNY HÖGSTRÖM, HELSINGBORGS DAGBLAD»Det är korta, roliga, underfundiga och helt vansinnigt absurda texter.« MATS GELLERFELT, SVENSKA DAGBLADET»Jag kapitulerar, säger helt enkelt: läs den...« UPSALA NYA TIDNINGKronoper & famer [1962] är ett av den latinamerikanske 1900-talsmästaren Julio Cortázars mest lästa och älskade verk.I bokens första del dissekeras en absurd blandning av aktiviteter och föremål. Därefter redogör berättaren för de besattheter och böjelser som kännetecknar hans familj. Men det är främst på historierna om kronoperna och famerna som bokens berömmelse vilar. Cortázar låter sina fantasifigurer framträda i en rad bisarra situationer. Med lekfullt djupsinne och absurd humor väver han trådar långt in i de mänskliga egenheternas labyrinter.Denna utgåva avslutas med tre nytillkomna historier om kronoperna och famerna. Dessa hittades i en byrålåda av Cortázars änka efter hans död och görs här för första gången tillgängliga på svenska i bokform.»Dessa absurda små historier är om möjligt ännu underbarare än jag kunnat föreställa mig. Här främmandegörs verkligheten, och därmed människan själv, ända in i sina grundvalar, och återuppstår därmed i en skinande ny dager. Det är naturligtvis mycket oroande, men också fasansfullt roligt. Det är faktiskt obeskrivligt befriande.« JENNY HÖGSTRÖM, HELSINGBORGS DAGBLAD»Att läsa Cortázar är att, samtidigt man skrattar sig halvt fördärvad, fyllas av den upplyftande insikten att litteraturen förmår göra allting nytt. Har man ännu inte stiftat bekantskap med detta egensinniga författarskap finns nu ett gyllene tillfälle. Så jag kapitulerar, säger helt enkelt: läs den...« JOHN SJÖGREN, UPSALA NYA TIDNING

Hoppa hage har hyllats som ett av 1900-talets stora romantekniska experiment. Det är en bok som kan bli två, om man väljer att följa den alternativa läsplanen. Men först och främst är det en storslagen kärleksroman som utspelar sig under sent femtiotal, existentialismens, bohemernas och jazzens decennium. Huvudpersonen Horacio Oliveira är en vinddriven argentinsk intellektuell som söker meningen med livet vid kaféborden i Paris. Där möter han den trolska Maga från Uruguay. Tragiska omständigheter skiljer dem åt, Maga försvinner utan spår och Oliveira söker sig tillbaka till Latinamerika för att leta efter henne.JULIO CORTÁZAR [1914 1984] är en av det förra seklets största och mest älskade författare. Han har haft en oöverskådlig betydelse för utvecklingen av den moderna latinamerikanska prosan.»Den som inte läser Cortázar är fördömd. Att inte läsa honom är en allvarlig, osynlig sjukdom som med tiden kan få fruktansvärda följder. Något i stil med en man som aldrig har smakat persikor. I tysthet skulle han bli allt sorgsnare... och antagligen skulle han så småningom tappa håret.« PABLO NERUDA

A collection of masterful short stories in Julio Cortazar's sophistocated, powerful and gripping style.'Julio Cortázar is truly a sorcerer and the best of him is here, in these hilariously fraught and almost eerily affecting stories' Kevin BarryA grieving family home becomes the site of a terrifying invasion. A frustrated love triangle, brought together by a plundered Aztec idol, spills over into brutality. A lodger’s inability to stop vomiting bunny rabbits inspires a personal confession. As dream melds into reality, and reality melts into nightmare, one constant remains throughout these thirty-five stories: the singular brilliance of Julio Cortazar’s imagination.WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY KEVIN BARRY ‘Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed’ Pablo Neruda

A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams . . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer''s victim . . . In the fifteen stories collected here—including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni''s film of the same name—Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.

Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Perón's government), Final Exam is Julio Cortázar's bitter and melancholy allegorical farewell to an Argentina from which he would soon be permanently self-exiled.In a surreal Buenos Aires, a strange fog has enveloped the city to everyone's bewilderment. Juan and Clara, two students at a college called "The House," meet up with their friends, and, instead of preparing for their final exam, wander the city, encountering strange happenings and pondering life in cafés. All the while, they are trailed by the mysterious Abel.With its daring typography, shifts in rhythm, as well as wildly veering directions of thought and speech, Final Exam breaks new ground in the territory of stream-of-consciousness writing. Darkly funny—and riddled with unresolved ambiguities—Final Exam is one of Cortázar's best works.Author of Hopscotch and Blow-Up, Julio Cortázar's (1914-1984) was a novelist, poet, essayist, and short-story writer. He was born in Brussels, lived in Argentina, but moved permanently to France in 1951, where he became one of the twentieth century's major experimental writers.

A traffic jam outside Paris lasts for weeks. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro meet on a mountaintop during the Cuban Revolution. A flight attendant becomes obsessed with a small Greek island, resulting in a surreal encounter with death. In All Fires the Fire, Julio Cortázar (author of Hopscotch and the short story “Blow-Up” ) creates his own mindscapes beyond space and time, where lives intersect for brief moments and situations break and refract. All Fires the Fire contains some of Julio Cortázar’s most beloved stories. It is a classic collection by “one of the world’s great writers” (Washington Post).

A kaleidoscopic novel by Julio Cortázar, A Certain Lucas contains a series of brilliant, eccentrically interlocking pieces, by turns comic, philosophical, allusive, and always a pleasure to read. In short takes, we are plunged directly into the life of Lucas, learning about his patriotism, his friends (“a list of cronies large and varied”), his shopping routines (always in his pajamas), his favorite pianists, his battles with the Hydra (“now that he’s growing old he realizes it’s not easy to kill it”) . . . his world is described in multiple quick parodies, with hilarious evocations of the latest trends: physical fitness, semiotics, cool pornography, and animal ESP. We are given glimpses and ultimately offered a strange, yet rounded portrait of a complete man, but not just any man. . . . This is a certain Lucas.

One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2016 "Cortazar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortazar is a people's poet, accessible from every angle, and his position as a titan of the Latin American boom is indisputable."--Publishers Weekly, starred review World renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortazar was also a prolific poet. While living in Paris during the last months of his life, Cortazar assembled his life's work in verse for publication, and Save Twilight selects the best of that volume, making his poems available in English for the very first time. This expanded edition, with nearly one hundred new pages of poems, prose and illustrations, is a book to be savored by both the familiar reader and the newcomer to Cortazar work. Ranging from the intimate to the political, tenderness to anger, heartbreak to awe, in styles both traditionally formal and free, Cortazar the poet and subverter of genres is revealed as a versatile and passionate virtuoso.More than a collection of poems, this book is a playful and revealing self-portrait of a writer in love with language in all its forms. Praise for Save Twilight: "With this expanded edition of Save Twilight, Stephen Kessler continues his project, begun in the 1980s, of translating poetry by Julio Cortazar. Widely known for his fiction, especially Hopscotch, a seminal work of the Latin American Boom, Cortazar was also a compelling poet. Kessler has found just the right turns of phrase in English to capture the Argentine's deeply moving writing and exceptionally emotive language. What a gift this collection is for English-speaking readers."--Edith Grossman, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation "Some people run the world, others are the world. Cortazar's poems are the world; they have a special consideration for the unknown."--Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel "What a pleasure, this walk in a well-orchestrated park with shades as complex, as light & as dark, as multifoliate as the actual world!This book--the 'poetic ecology' Cortazar had envisioned--is an open invitation to make yourselves at home twixt sea and loss, wine & sorrow, birth & riptide, tobacco & talk, laughter & death. Nothing human is foreign to the poet--& he brings it home with great clarity & grace. The writing & the book embody a tradition of hospitality, or as Cortazar puts it: 'Hello little black book for the late hours, cats on the prowl under a paper moon.' The injunction to save twilight stands as title--it is also exactly what the writing accomplishes. Stephen Kessler's elegant, accurate, and sometimes felicitously ose translations do these poems more than justice."--Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012) "For those who have enjoyed Cortazar's fiction, among the most seminal and compelling of our time, here now are his wonderful poems. And for those who don't know Cortazar from a cat, it's a chance to visit his crepuscular world in all its multiple layers. A tender, experimental, humorous, meditative, jazzy, heart-breaking collection to be relished and savored slowly."--Ariel Dorfman, author of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile Julio Cortazar was born in Brussels in 1914 of Argentinian parents, raised in Argentina, and spent his most productive years in Paris, where he died in 1984.

Translated by Gregory Rabassa, winner of the National Book Award for Translation, 1967Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child''s death and La Maga''s disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira''s astonishing adventures.

These three groundbreaking works by Julio Cortázar—a major figure of world literature and one of the founders of the Latin American Boom—are published together in one volume for the first time, in honor of the centenary of his birth.             With his influential “counternovel” HOPSCOTCH and his unforgettable short stories, Cortázar earned a place among the most innovative authors of the twentieth century. HOPSCOTCH is a nonlinear novel about an Argentinean writer living in Paris; it consists of 155 short chapters that the author advises the reader to read out of order. BLOW-UP and WE LOVE GLENDA SO MUCH bring together the most famous of Cortázar’s short fiction, including “Axolotl,” “End of the Game,” “The Night Face Up,” “Continuity of Parks,” “Bestiary,” and “Blow-Up”. These are stories in which invisible beasts stalk children in their homes, the reader of a mystery finds out that he is the murderer’s intended victim, an injured motorcyclist is pursued by Aztec warriors, and a man becomes a salamander in a Parisian zoo. In Cortázar’s work, laws of nature, physics, and narrative fall away, leaving us with an astonishing new view of the world.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

A collection of masterful short stories in Julio Cortazar's sophistocated, powerful and gripping style.'Julio Cortázar is truly a sorcerer and the best of him is here, in these hilariously fraught and almost eerily affecting stories' Kevin BarryA grieving family home becomes the site of a terrifying invasion. A frustrated love triangle, brought together by a plundered Aztec idol, spills over into brutality. A lodger’s inability to stop vomiting bunny rabbits inspires a personal confession. As dream melds into reality, and reality melts into nightmare, one constant remains throughout these thirty-five stories: the singular brilliance of Julio Cortazar’s imagination.WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY KEVIN BARRY ‘Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed’ Pablo Neruda

Oliveira wants certainty. Living in Paris, he gets jazz, love and beautiful disorder. Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece, the forerunner of the Latin Boom in the 1960s, is published in Vintage Classics for the first time. Dazed by the disappearance of his muse, Argentinian writer Horatio Oliveira wanders the bridges of Paris while jazz, literature, life and art echo around him. A chance encounter with a literary idol and his new work, a novel that can be read in random order, sends Horatio’s mind into further confusion. As a return to Buenos Aires beckons, Horatio’s friend and fellow artist, Traveler, awaits his arrival with dread. Their lives are ready to play out in an inexhaustible game of indeterminacy. Hopscotch is a landmark Latin American literary novel about art, exile, love, form and uncertainty. Experimental, restless and intellectually alive, it remains one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction. 'Cortazar's masterpiece. This is the first great novel of Spanish America... A powerful anti-novel but, like deeply understood moments in life itself, rich with many kinds of potential meanings and intimations' Times Literary Supplement

In a fog-drenched Buenos Aires, Juan and Clara should be preparing for their final exam. Instead, they roam the city with friends, drifting through cafés, encountering strange happenings, and unravelling life’s mysteries. All the while, they are shadowed by the mysterious Abel.Darkly funny and steeped in ambiguity, Final Exam is Julio Cortázar’s haunting allegory of a world on the brink—his melancholic, defiant farewell to an Argentina he would soon leave behind forever.

In a fog-drenched Buenos Aires, Juan and Clara should be preparing for their final exam. Instead, they roam the city with friends, drifting through cafés, encountering strange happenings, and unravelling life’s mysteries. All the while, they are shadowed by the mysterious Abel.Darkly funny and steeped in ambiguity, Final Exam is Julio Cortázar’s haunting allegory of a world on the brink—his melancholic, defiant farewell to an Argentina he would soon leave behind forever.

When a group of Argentinians win a mysterious lottery, their prize – a luxury cruise – seems too good to question. But as the voyage unfolds, strange and unsettling events begin to mount. The passengers find themselves trapped aboard a ship run by a silent, secretive crew, and the true nature of their journey grows ever more uncertain.Funny, frightening, and richly lyrical, The Winners is a philosophical thriller of tangled fates and wayward love – an incisive meditation on power, exile, and the myth of the New World.