Di Benedetto, Antonio. Nest in the Bones: Stories. Brooklyn. 2017. Archipelago Books. 9780914671725. Translated from the Spanish by Martina Broner. 275 pages. paperback.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

Philosophically engaged and darkly moving, the twenty stories in Nest in the Bones span three decades from Antonio di Benedetto’s wildly various career. From his youth in Argentina to his exile in Spain after enduring imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorship during the so-called “dirty war” to his return in the 1980s, Benedetto’s kinetic stories move effortlessly between genres, examining civilization’s subtle but violent imprint on human consciousness. A late-twentieth century master of the short form and revered by his contemporaries, Nest in the Bones is the first comprehensive volume of Benedetto’s stories available in English. PRAISE: “This collection from renowned Argentinean author Di Benedetto (Zama) showcases his short stories’ development from sparse and experimental into melancholic, deeply affecting fables… These stories bolster Di Benedetto’s reputation as a visionary talent, and serve as a worthy introduction to one of Latin America’s most influential writers.” — Publishers Weekly. “[B]lends the fantastic sensibilities of Borges and Kafka with the profound pessimism of Dostoyevsky… Di Benedetto’s view of the world is gloomy, his writing precise and poetic. It’s a winning combination.” — Kirkus Reviews. “an impressive swath of subjects, emotions and perspectives. . . Readers with a love of Latin American authors will find Di Benedetto a welcome addition to the canon that’s available in English.” — Noah Cruickshank, the Field Museum, in Shelf Awareness. “In every story, the Argentine journalist confronts bare suffering with a linguistic precision and a talent for imagery that his translator, Martina Broner, captures effortlessly… Nest in the Bones offers a whirlwind introduction to a writer whose enormous weight in Latin America is finally becoming palpable outside its borders.” — Harvard Review. “Very well translated… displays to perfection…the range of [Di Benedetto’s] experiments with strangeness…Di Benedetto’s characters, with their ‘secret wounds, their isolation and their irony, and above all their lightly masochistic self-irony,’ are companions of those of Svevo, Pessoa and Kafka.” — London Review of Books. “[NEST IN THE BONES is] a sampling of the Argentine’s short fiction… demonstrating an extraordinary experimental and emotional range that Zama—largely confined as it is to the perspective of a single self-centered narrator—could only hint at.” — Public Books. “Di Benedetto has written indispensable pages that have moved and continue moving me.” — Jorge Luis Borges. “One of the greatest Argentinean writers and one of the greatest writers of Latin America.” — Roberto Bolaño.

Antonio di Benedetto (2 November 1922 in Mendoza – 10 October 1986 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine journalist and writer. Di Benedetto began writing and publishing stories in his teens, inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luigi Pirandello. Mundo Animal, appearing in 1952, was his first story collection and won prestigious awards. A revised version came out in 1971, but the Xenos Books translation uses the first edition to catch the youthful flavor. Antonio di Benedetto wrote five novels, the most famous being the existential masterpiece Zama (1956). El Silenciero (The Silencer, 1964) is noteworthy for expressing his intense abhorrence of noise. Critics have compared his works to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato. In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released a year later, he went into exile in Spain, then returned home in 1984. He travelled widely and won numerous awards, but never acquired the worldwide fame of other Latin American writers, perhaps because his work was not translated to many languages.

Esther Allen has translated Javier Marías, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and José Martí. She currently teaches at Baruch College (CUNY) and has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its founding in 2003. Allen has received a Fulbright Grant and two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, and in 2006 was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.