The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine

The Thinking-About-Gladys MachineWidely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th century Latin America, Mario Levreros writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination. In none other of the authors books is this imagination so clearly on display as in The Thinking About Gladys Machine, his 1970 debut collection of stories. It gathers a variety of Levreros earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro fictions

Widely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th-century Latin America, Mario Levrero’s writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination. In none other of the author’s books is this imagination so clearly on display as in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, his 1970 debut collection of stories. It gathers a variety of Levrero’s earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro-fictions à la Donald Barthelme to adventurous Lewis Carroll-esque tales of forty pages' length.

From the shocking surreal twists of ‘Beggar Street’ to the Escher-like grammatical maze of ‘The Boarding House’, via the pseudo-fairy tale classic ‘The Basement’, this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.