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Archipelago Books

From Julio

From Julio

Selected Letters of Julio Cortázar, Volume One (1937–1966)

by Julio Cortázar, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and Sarah Moses

$27.00
$27.00
Available as E-Book International Literature Latin American Literature Spanish Literature
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Julio Cortázar's extraordinary novels and short stories changed the course of 20th-century literature. In this first volume of letters, readers will find Cortázar, candid and mischievous, describing his life, reflecting on art, and practically bouncing with questions for his interlocutors. These letters reflect a warm spirit coupled with a uniquely inventive and daring mind. They traverse Cortázar's move from Argentina to Paris, his love affair and the first years of a lifelong friendship with Edith Aron (the inspiration for La Maga in Hopscotch), his romance and marriage to Aurora Bernárdez, his friendships with artists from Alejandra Pizarnik to Luis Buñuel to Mario Vargas Llosa. In letters to his translators and fellow cronopios, Cortázar gives insights into the creation of his early work and describes his reactions to the poems and novels that inspired him. Passionate and tremendously generous, Cortázar's high tempo prose is bound to delight readers, from the most devoted of devotees to burgeoning bibliophiles who have not yet discovered Cortázar's fiction.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770675
Pages: 624
Publication Date:

Praise

I’m permanently indebted to the work of Cortázar.
—Roberto Bolaño

Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder… and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair.
—Pablo Neruda

He was, perhaps without trying, the Argentine who made the whole world love him.
—Gabriel García Márquez

Beyond Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Cortázar never published a diary. His first wife, Aurora Bernárdez, says Cortázar’s best autobiography is his correspondence . . . The Letters have multiple personalities. Cortázar the generous opens up his homes to out-of-towners, serves up extra portions of hazelnut spread for the morning baguettes or crêpes . . . Cortázar the gossip knows how much money is owed whom; knows who got rejected for this or that award . . . Each of [Cortázar's] books are completely unlike the others. Each is unmistakably cortazariano. For the non-specialist, there’s almost too much Cortázar to absorb . . . From Julio [is] an excellent introduction.
—Kevin Brown, New English Review

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