Brazos Bookstore will host Gisela Heffes in person on Tuesday, March 28 at 6:30pm.
Gisela Heffes will be in conversation with Andrea Bajani.
Ischia is a portrait of an unnamed narrator and protagonist who, along with her friends, wanders through the margins of different cities, especially Buenos Aires, searching for something they don’t know and seems unfathomable.
An intricate, gutsy, and raw novel, Ischia is populated with outsiders who navigate the vicissitudes of life in Argentina and the world. Ischia, the first-person female narrator, is the youngest in a family of seven brothers and relates her experiences as she waits for a ride to the Argentine international airport. Told through the dizzying would-have-could-have of conditionals, Ischia overlaps the past, present, and future of three young characters defined by lack of certainty or expectations.
These three lives unfold between disenchantment and humor, and the narration transports the readers into a universe of memories, desires, and dreams. The novel advances lyrically through themes both solemn and lighthearted, shaping the contours of imaginaries, hilarious, and sometimes even surreal experiences.
Gisela Heffes is a writer and a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Rice University. She is the editor of the annotated anthology Judíos/Argentinos/Escritores (1999), and author of two monographs: Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana (2008) and Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación. Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América latina (2013), which received the First Honorable Mention of the LASA Southern Cone section (Humanities) in 2015. A translated, expanded, and updated English edition is coming out in 2023 with Palgrave under the title Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment. She has edited the collections of essays Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos (2012) and Utopías urbanas. Geopolítica del deseo en América latina (2013). She was also the guest editor for the special issue of Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana on “Ecocrítica” (2014). More recently, she co-edited The Latin American Eco-Cultural Reader (2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021), Un gabinete para el futuro (2022), and Turbar la quietud (2023). As a fiction writer, she is the author of the novels Ischia (2000), Praga (2001), and Ischia, Praga & Bruselas (2005); the collection of short stories, Glossa urbana (2012); a collection of poetic chronicles, Aldea Lounge (2014); the novella, Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities; the novel Cocodrilos en la noche (2020); the bilingual collection of poems, El cero móvil de su boca / The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020; translated to French, Portuguese and Swedish), and Aquí no hubo ni una Estrella (forthcoming 2023 with Sed Ediciones). Her novel Cocodrilos en la noche is forthcoming in a new edition with Grupo Planeta (2023).
Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975) is one of the most respected and award-winning novelists and poets of contemporary Italian literature. He is the author of four novels and three collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, published in the US by Archipelago and translated by Elizabeth Harris, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. His latest novel, Il libro delle Case (The Book of Homes) was finalist for the Premio Strega and the Premio Campiello, and is being translated in more than seventeen countries. It will be published in the US by Deep Vellum. He is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Rice University, in Houston, Texas.