Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today and should not be missed

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

Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aira's works are like slim cabinets of wonder, full of unlikely juxtapositions. His unpredictability is masterful

Aira's novels display a consistent engagement with the importance of storytelling and the act of writing. The engrossing power of his work comes from how he carries out these feats: with the inexhaustible energy and pleasure of a child chasing after imaginary enemies in the park

To love the novels of Cesar Aira you must have a taste for the absurd, a tolerance for the obscurely philosophical and a willingness to laugh out loud against your better judgment

Aira's charm is subtle, unobtrusive, it doesn't try to seduce with cheap likeability. He takes a leisurely stroll through his scenes. It's as if Machado de Assis got redrafted by Bolaño and edited by Anatole France

César Aira's novels are the narrative equivalent of the Exquisite Corpse, that Surrealist parlor game in which players add to drawings or stories without knowledge of previous or subsequent additions. Wildly heterogeneous elements are thrown together, and the final result never fails to surprise and amuse

In spite of the apparent randomness of his ideas and the pacing of his breaks, surprises, and cuts in time, he inspires a sort of willingness in the reader to be taken aback; any reader-untrusting or submissive-might enjoy them as if they had pressed "shuffle" on their favorite pop band's discography

What's really unique about Aira's output, considering the speed with which he 'flies forward' (seemingly by the seat of his pants), isn't that he produces so much work, or that it's fanciful and odd, but that what he's produced forms a coherent body of work - and one that's consistently enjoyable to read

A manifestly gifted writer

Astonishing-turns Don Quixote into Picasso

Blistering, brilliant.

A true American artist ... a revelator for this still new century.

A dizzying mix of humour and near tragedy that leaves us unsure whether to laugh or weep… For too long, Denis Johnson was not sufficiently appreciated. A fine novelist and poet, as well as one of the best short story writers of his generation.

An instant classic…A masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose…. It's filled with Johnson's unparalleled ability to inject humor, profundity, and beauty—often all three—into the dark and the mundane alike. These characters have been pushed toward the edge; through their searches for meaning or clawing just to hold onto life, Johnson is able to articulate what it means to be alive, and to have hope.

Like a good rock song, a typical Denis Johnson sentence describes, with total precision, what an emotion feels like … Johnson has sometimes been compared to Ernest Hemingway for his creation of a distinctive American idiom.

Denis Johnson was the best American writer of the past twenty-five years.

He was the kind of writer who comes along once in a generation, if that often: a true original, in the same league as Melville and Whitman.

Here are stories that feel generously improvised but never haphazard, uncanny but earthy, reconciled to the passing of time but themselves out of time. Few books so relentlessly concerned with death feel so relentlessly alive.

Denis Johnson writes short stories like no one has ever done before. He makes the normal electric; the everyday enormous. There is not a single word here that does not hit you square in the face and say: look, this is what it's about, this is what you need to know.

Denis Johnson’s stories are astonishing… they dash between quicksilver wit and gallows humour, twinning the superficial with the profound so elegantly. His sentences are exquisite, often having the capacity to sock a sudden punch. The last story made me gasp.

[An] absorbing collection of deceptively rambling, craftily casual tales ... Magical stuff.

Sometimes streetwise and tough, and always informal, light, elegant and miraculously tender.

The late Denis Johnson is arguably the most influential American prose writer of the last thirty years ... and in the posthumously published The Largess of the Sea Maiden it is blindingly clear why.

The five darkly comic stories that comprise The Largesse of the Sea Maiden are befitting final testaments to [Johnson’s] wild originality... His sentences, like his plots, are full of gorgeous little shocks.