29 Ways to Drown - Tapa blanda

Niki Aguirre is that rarest of writers, one who possesses an exuberant imagination, but who also casts a devastatingly sharp eye on human reality. --Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

Mixing the passion of autobiographical honesty with a mystical sense of universal magic, Niki Aguirre brings her literary world to vivid life. The characters haunt and intrigue... Her exquisite tales resonate long after the last page... --Courttia Newland; author of The Scholar, Society Within and Snakeskin

The territorial explorations of Aguirre are more Calvino than Theroux. In Aguirre's fiction, we discover a uniquely mature imagination sharing secrets, oaths, threats, platitudes, pleas, fables and warnings that could have emerged from Gogol, Borges, Paley, Carver or Singer. Aguirre's imagination is beautifully served by her technical virtuosity and lyrical precision which craft unforgettable characters, dialogue ranging from the tragically inarticulate to the magically illuminating, and narrative structures worthy of Poe, Kafka, Atwood or Nabokov. --Lauri Ramey, California State University, Los Angeles

"29 Ways to Drown", is the debut short story collection of Niki Aguirre, a stunningly talented Ecuadorean-American writer whose work has previously been published in three acclaimed anthologies. Influenced by a Latin American literary tradition steeped in magic realism, but embracing a personal history that has included living in Chicago, Cadiz, Guayaquil and London, Niki's fiction conveys a gritty, often scientifically-sophisticated, world with a haze of surrealism. Shamans parade the pages side-by-side with lovesick film buffs, papers and humans fly at will, and intellectual and professional quests lead to self-destruction.Whether it's a boy trapped at age fourteen after a botched attempt to capture time in a capsule, an organic seed distributor entrapping an errant lover with a replica pre-Columbian Aztec artefact bought in Chicago, or a woman attempting to drown herself in a water aerobics class in London, Niki Aguirre's stories grip by their absolute logic and the sheer absurdity of the inevitable truths they unravel. Latin America has always had its literary fiction heroes, but not many have come from Ecuador; based on the quality of Niki Aguirre's assured debut, it has been worth the wait.