On June 30th, Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon will host a special panel discussion between novelists Jeff VanderMeer, Cari Luna, and Kimberly King Parsons about Five, a collection of novellas by the exquisitely outrageous César Aira, forthcoming on July 28, 2026.
The astonishing and dreamlike novellas that make up Five—Margarita (A Memory), The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, Princess Springtime, and The Hormone Pill—show the facets of Aira’s masterful mind, turning expectations inside out and gleefully exploding conventions.
Books will be available for purchase at the event, and for preorder here.
Celebration of Five at Powell’s City of Books
Jeff VanderMeer, Cari Luna, and Kimberly King Parsons in conversation
When: Tuesday, June 30 at 7pm
Where: Powell’s City of Books, 1005 West Burnside Street, Portland, OR
Register here
P.S. For a peek of Aira’s wondrous madness, read The Hormone Pill in Harper’s Magazine.
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than 100 books to date, and his writing has been translated into French, English, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Austrian, Romanian, and Russian. In addition to winning the 2021 Formentor Prize, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the International Booker Prize.
The poet and translator Chris Andrews has won the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Translation Prize for his work. He has translated nine books by Roberto Bolaño and thirteen books (and counting) by César Aira, as well as many other Spanish- and French-language authors. Andrews has also published two collections of poems, Cut Lunch and Lime Green Chair, for which he won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.
About the Panelists:
Jeff VanderMeer is an American author, editor, and literary critic. The first volume of his Southern Reach series, Annihilation, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards, and was adapted into a movie by Paramount. The New Yorker dubbed him the “King of Weird Fiction.”
Cari Luna is the author of The Revolution of Every Day, which won the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Jacobin, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, PANK, and elsewhere. Cari lives in Portland, Oregon.
Kimberly King Parsons is a National Book Award nominee and the bestselling author of We Were the Universe (a New York Times Editors’ Choice), winner of the Oregon Book Award, and a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award and the Texas Book Award. Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the Story Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Award. Parsons teaches at Pacific University and lives in Portland.
