“Levrero is an author who challenges the canonical idea of Latin American literature. If you really want to complete the puzzle of our tradition, you must read him.” —Juan Pablo Villalobos, GrantaWidely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th-century Uruguay, Mario Levrero’s writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination. In none other of the author’s books is this imagination so clearly on display as in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, his first book of stories.
It gathers a variety of Levrero’s earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro-fictions à la Donald Barthelme, to adventurous Lewis Carroll-esque tales of forty pages' length.
From the shocking surreal twists of ‘Street of the Beggars’ to the Escher-like grammatical maze of ‘The Boarding House’ to the pseudo-fairy tale classic ‘The Basement’, this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.
