Three Novels: César Aira (Penguin Essentials, 82) - Tapa blanda

Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today and should not be missed (The New York Times)

Aira has written over seventy books. They are mostly novels, mostly slim, and mostly astoundingly good. He reminds me of Philip K. Dick, of Honore de Balzac, of Machado de Assis, and of Soren Kierkegaard... all of which is simply to say that he is without compare (Rivka Galchen The New Yorker)

Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald (Mark Doty Los Angeles Times)

The author who nowadays is perhaps the most original shocking, the most exciting and subversive Spanish narrative writer: Cesar Aira (Ignacio Echeverri)

He is an improviser, his work a performance on the page. But experimental, improvisational, performative and dream-like as Aira's many marvellous books are, they also reveal him to be no less of a traditionalist, responding to the most ancient custom of storytelling as a way of passing the hours of the night (Judges’ citation, The Man Booker International Prize 2015)

Cesar Aira is writing a gigantic, headlong, acrobatic fresco of modern life entirely made up of novelettes, novellas, novellitos... In other words, he is a great literary trickster, and also one of the most charming (Adam Thirlwell)

Aira's stories seem like shards from an ever expanding interconnecting universe. He populates the racing void with multitudinous visions, like Indian paintings of gods vomiting gods. He executes digression with muscular lucidity (Patti Smith The New York Times)

César Aira's body of work is a perfect machine for invention-he writes without necessity or any apparent forebears, always as if for the first time (Maria Moreno BOMB Magazine)

If there's currently a writer who defies all classification that writer is César Aira. Once you've read Aira, you don't want to stop. Aira is an eccentric, but he's also one of the three or four best Spanish-language writers alive today (Roberto Bolaño)

Aira's works are like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful (Rivka Galchen Harper's)