“The Rose Garden” by Maeve Brennan. Eternal Cadence, 384 pages, $35,900
The rediscovery of North American or English authors who, with a short work or without having achieved great success, were ignored later in life continues constantly and happily. The publishing frenzy of this time, fortunately, led to the rescue of magnificent writers, unjustly forgotten. Now it is the turn to read the Irish Maeve Brennan in “The Rose Garden”, a volume of stories edited by Eterna Cadencia, with a prologue and translation by Jorge Fondebrider.
Brennan was known in the United States, her adopted country, for her humorous society columns in The New Yorker. But he also wrote collections of short stories and even a novel (“De visita”, published in Spanish by Lumen). Notable authors such as Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro and Edna O’Brien admired her. But the writer did not have a happy ending. She died due to her alcoholism, only assisted by her former colleagues.
Most of his stories take place between Ireland and the United States. In “The Rose Garden,” the recurring location is Herbert’s Retreat, a riverside town very close to New York, with many characteristics of a modern-day gated community. Constant social life, raw competition for topics as trivial as the view of a house or the design of a living room and a marked protagonism of the maids. Light stories that hide passions: envy, contempt and class struggle. Highly recommended.
“The Gardener and Death” by Georgi Gospodinov. Impedimenta, 224 pages, $56,500.
Almost unknown in Argentina, Gospodinov is very famous in his country, Bulgaria, and in Europe where he won, among other prizes, the International Booker and the Strega. He began his career as a poet and later wrote novels, plays, short stories and essays. The Impedimenta label, the main disseminator in Spanish of Eastern European authors, plans to continue translating their works in the future.
“The Gardener and Death” is an autobiographical book that details the end of his father’s life, from the beginning of his illness to the final moment of his absence. A worker, a resident of a small town near the country’s capital, Sofia, who became a passionate gardener in old age. “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden,” says the first sentence of this fragmentary text, which jumps from the present to the past, from illness to childhood anecdotes, from the emptiness of absence to philosophical reflection on death.
The language is simple. Anyone who has gone through this situation can recognize themselves in the author’s anguish and helplessness. A good first step to discover a great writer.
“Living in a gated community” by Ricardo Greene. 21st century, 288 pages, $25,990.
“Living is a political act” is the first sentence of the book “Living in a gated community” by the sociologist and master in Urban Development, Ricardo Greene. Who remains within the borders of the “country” and who remains outside? That is the big question that dictates the definition of this ideal land where “everyday life is designed to avoid friction, stress and exposure to the unexpected,” as the author explains in the introduction.
Nordelta is the chosen field of study (the largest gated community in the country), a symbol par excellence of the space preferred by a certain upper class, celebrities and fortunes of diverse origins. Although Greene clarifies: his research is not intended to stigmatize those who choose the place nor idealize those who look from the outside.
Through the different chapters, the work explores the context of Nordelta in relation to the situation of the suburbs, on issues such as security and tensions with those who work in and around it, with testimonies from owners and employees. An x-ray of the social conflicts that cross all our territories.
“Intimacy of a trade” by Liliana Heker. Godot, 81 pages, $17,900.
This volume inaugurates the Intimate Collection of Godot publishing house, a collection that will tell the writing experiences of diverse authors. Agustina Bazterrica wrote the second launch text “Literature or death”. “I do not intend to idealize the craft of writing: (…) it is what I know how to do, it is what I like,” Heker confesses.
“Book of My Lives” by Margaret Atwood. Salamandra, 688 pages, $44,999.
In this long volume the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, a symbol of women’s fight against subjugation; It reviews not only the chronological chapters of his life, but also dedicates extensive pages to each of his books explaining its genesis, the decisions he makes in relation to his characters and their publication.
“Alaska Diary” by Lara Segade. Energy Forest, 122 pages. $24,900.
Several well-known writers have written diaries for this small imprint, Bosque Energetic, which carefully publishes texts that cross narrative with poetry. Lara Segade is a poet but in “Diario de Alaska” she builds the narrative of two key life situations: the birth of a child, the decline of a mother. In this diary, the language adheres to reality until it breaks its linearity with the thickness of poetry.
“The twins, the dream” by Diana Bellesi and Ursula K. Le Guin. Rara Avis, 270 pages, $37,000
This unavailable book, published for the first time in 1996, returns to bookstores in the Rara Avis edition, with a new prologue by Diana Bellesi. What can we say about two giants of literature, who become friends, exchange letters for decades and one day decide to translate each other (from English to Spanish, from Spanish to English)? The result is this beautiful volume from whichever way you look at it. “A wonderful bridge stretched from north to south and from south to north, a bridge worthy of the extraordinary stories that Ursula K. Le Guin told and that will live forever,” Bellesi greets in her preface to her friend, Osita, who left in 2018.
The most read
Fiction
1- “The last secret”
Dan Brown
2- “Blood secrets”
Viviana Rivero
3- “What will remain of us”
Eduardo Sacheri
4- “The things we lost in the fire”
Mariana Enriquez
5- “My name is Emilia del Valle”
Isabel Allende
Non-fiction
1- “Loneliness”
Gabriel Rolon
2- “Franco”
Mauricio Macri
3- “You sell or you sell”
Grant Cardone
4- “Letters for life”
Leviy Shmotkin
5- “Chinese horoscope 2026”
Ludovica Squirru Dari
Source: Yenny and El Ateneo Bookstores.
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