The Monterroso-Ginzburg Book BoxMay 1, 2025
The Monterroso-Ginzburg Book Box
$32.00 $
The Monterroso-Ginzburg Book Box: Precision, Irony, and Quiet Rage
Two literary lightning bolts—brief in form, explosive in insight.
This limited edition book box showcases two books that we are very excited about!
The Rest Is Silence
Augusto Monterroso
Augusto Monterroso was a Honduran-Guatemalan writer who was renowned for being Latin America’s “most expansive miniaturist”. Italo Calvino called his surreal narratives “the most beautiful stories in the world.” The Rest Is Silence (which were also the last words of Prince Hamlet) is Monterroso’s only novel.
From NYRB:
The Rest Is Silence presents the reader with the kaleidoscopic portrait of a provincial Mexican literary critic, one Eduardo Torres, a sort of Don Quixote of the Sunday supplements, whose colossal misreadings are matched only by the scale of his vanity. Presented in the form of a festschrift for the aging writer, this rollicking metafiction offers up a bouquet of highly unreliable reminiscences by Torres’s friends, relations, and servants (their accounts skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savant’s own comically botched attempts at “criticism.”Monterroso’s narrative is a ludicrous dissection of literary self-conceit, a (Groucho) Marxian skewering of the Mexican literary landscape, and perhaps a wry self-portrait by an author who is profoundly sensible of just how high the stakes of the art of criticism really are—and, consequently, of just how far it has to fall.
The Rest Is Silence presents the reader with the kaleidoscopic portrait of a provincial Mexican literary critic, one Eduardo Torres, a sort of Don Quixote of the Sunday supplements, whose colossal misreadings are matched only by the scale of his vanity. Presented in the form of a festschrift for the aging writer, this rollicking metafiction offers up a bouquet of highly unreliable reminiscences by Torres’s friends, relations, and servants (their accounts skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savant’s own comically botched attempts at “criticism.”Monterroso’s narrative is a ludicrous dissection of literary self-conceit, a (Groucho) Marxian skewering of the Mexican literary landscape, and perhaps a wry self-portrait by an author who is profoundly sensible of just how high the stakes of the art of criticism really are—and, consequently, of just how far it has to fall.
The Dry Heart
Natalia Ginzburg
The Dry Heart, a reissue of what the publishers calls “a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage”, is an early work of Natalia Ginzburg. If you’re familiar with Ginzburg’s more famous and later works, this novel is a delightful peak at the early years of Ginzburg as a writer, where the shadows of fascism hung closer than ever over her.
From New Directions:
Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?
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- Description
The Monterroso-Ginzburg Book Box: Precision, Irony, and Quiet Rage
📘 The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso:
A riotous, metafictional satire of literary ego and self-delusion, delivered with Monterroso’s trademark miniature brilliance.📕 The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg:
A cool, searing plunge into loneliness and marital despair—told with surgical clarity and haunting restraint.Sharp, subversive, unforgettable.
For readers who like their fiction short, incisive, and a little bit unhinged.
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