About this Event
Please join us in person on Thursday, May 9th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate two forthcoming novels by Andrés Neuman, Once Upon Argentina (translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia) and Sensitive Anatomy (translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia). Andres will be in conversation with Exile MVP Vincent Francone!
About the books:
Once Upon Argentina:
One day, a man—our narrator—receives an unexpected letter from his grandmother, kicking off a literary adventure that bring home to him everything he has not seen.
Once Upon Argentina relates the lives of the narrator’s relatives—a group of people from all over the world gathered in a land where immigrant traditions merge and thrive. The lives of these relatives intersect, converging like a set of Matryoshka dolls or a hall of mirrors, as the personal and political stories of the twentieth century converge.
Beyond these stories of hardship and triumph, Andrés Neuman’s novel experiments with the nature of the autobiography, encompassing prenatal memories, expanding the autofiction genre with a new voice and twist. Merging present and past, collective experiences and his own, the narrator explores a genealogy populated by unforgettable characters, offering us the story of the construction of a country, his Argentine childhood, and his early literary discoveries.
With extraordinary delicacy and intensity combining elegy, tragedy, and humor, Andrés Neuman reveals a world as real as it is fantastic, as strange as it is our own. Once Upon Argentina is a coming-of-age tale, a political novel, and a love letter to the absent ones.
Sensitive Anatomy:
In the era of compulsive touch-ups and digital poses, perhaps it is time to re-read our body in order to rescue it and embrace it with joy.
The thirty brief chapters of Sensitive Anatomy form a celebration of the body in its glorious entirety, from the most obvious zones to those commonly less appreciated. This is a poetic, political, and hedonistic journey across the very matter that makes us. A book that questions how we see ourselves, how we are made to see, and what beauty really is. It playfully stands against the culture of Photoshop, against oppressive images, against all those edits and erasures which end up excluding the vast majority of real people.
Uniting genres, genders, and generations through a collective voice, Neuman continues to extend the limits of short-form prose with irony and creative freedom. All bodies are welcome here.
About the authors:
Andrés Neuman (1977) was selected as one of Granta’s "Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists" and was included on the Bogotá-39 list. He is the author of numerous novels, short stories, poems, aphorisms, and travel books, including Traveler of the Century, Talking to Ourselves, The Things We Don’t Do, Bariloche, and Fracture. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.
Vincent Francone is the author of the memoir Like a Dog and the essay collection The Soft Lunacy and editor of the anthology Open Heart Chicago. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his writing has appeared in New City, Eclectica Magazine, and Southword, among other journals. He is Editor-in-Chief of Jabber(www.jabberthemag.com) and teaches at Roosevelt University.
About the event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free. Andrés and Vincent will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online after the event.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
