Jordan Landsman
Jordan Landsman was born in New York City. After graduating from Binghamton University, he spent several years living in Buenos Aires, where he co-created the BA Comedy Lab and taught literary workshops at Walrus Books. The Novices of Lerna is his first translation.
titles translated by Jordan Landsman
ÁNGEL BONOMINI
Translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman
“Revelatory and seductive.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Enigmatic fictions from a lost master of Argentine literature.
A man and woman on a road trip make an unplanned detour to Laar, an empty city of palaces and canals that may be no city at all. Two gaucho rebels are captured during war—one finds freedom in writing stories while the other is driven mad with envy. And a traveler in postwar Italy is inspired, almost against his will, to record the mysterious progress of two elephants through the foggy streets of Milan.
In twelve short fictions threaded together by an insatiable curiosity about time, memory, art, and the divine, Ángel Bonomini (The Novices of Lerna) explores “the sweet and subtle interrelations of things.” Originally published in 1978 and appearing in English for the first time, Slow Elephants of Milan is an indispensable addition to our literature of the strange and fantastic.
Ángel Bonomini
Translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman
A forgotten masterpiece by an enigmatic master of Argentine fantastic literature.
When unambitious scholar Ramón Beltra receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland, he reluctantly complies with the unusual qualifying paperwork requiring several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body. Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other “novices” subject to the same undisclosed project—all of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school’s dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one...
The Novices of Lerna introduces Bonomini’s fantastic tales to English readers for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient.
“I’m so enthralled by the book that one night, when Borges came over, I proposed we read the only story I hadn’t read yet: “The Novices of Lerna.” We were dazzled. The story is admirably told, with much wisdom, everything is spot on.”
—Letter from Adolfo Bioy Casares to Ángel Bonomini, September 18, 1972
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