Staff Pick
Ricardo Piglia's Target in the Night is detective story, murder mystery, and political noir in one. The Argentine writer (described by Bolaño as "one of the best Latin American novelists writing today") was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos and National Critics Prizes for Target in the Night. with a rich cast of enigmatic and colorful characters, Piglia's tale simmers with intrigue and thrilling subtlety.
Set in the early 1970s (preceding Argentina's Dirty War), Target in the Night effortlessly blends the best elements of both literary and detective fiction. With measured plotting and a carefully constructed narrative (and a Jungian dream machine!), Piglia adeptly uses his characters to reveal multiple perspectives — deftly playing their motivations and assumptions against one another. Target in the Night, one of a handful of Piglia's books available in English translation, unfurls with enshrouded drama, tinged as it is with both social observation and familial mystique. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"Ricardo Piglia may be the best Latin American writer to have appeared since the heyday of Gabriel García Márquez."—Kirkus Reviews
A passionate political and psychological thriller set in a remote Argentinean Pampas town, Target in the Night is an intense and tragic family history reminiscent of King Lear, in which the madness of the detective is integral to solving crimes. Target in the Night, a masterpiece, won every major literary prize in the Spanish language in 2011.
Ricardo Piglia (b. 1941), widely considered the greatest living Argentine novelist, has taught for decades in American universities, including most recently at Princeton.
Synopsis
A masterful psychological and political crime novel by Argentina's greatest living writer expands the genre of "paranoid fiction."
Synopsis
"Ricardo Piglia may be the best Latin American writer to have appeared since the heyday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Piglia opens a window into a fascinating world, leaving the reader hungry for more." -- Publishers Weekly
One of the BBC's Ten Books to Read (December 2015)
A passionate political and psychological thriller set in a remote Argentinean Pampas town, Target in the Night is an intense and tragic family history reminiscent of King Lear, in which the madness of the detective is integral to solving crimes. Target in the Night, a dark, philosophical masterpiece, won every major literary prize in the Spanish language in 2011.
Ricardo Piglia (b. 1941), widely considered the greatest living Argentine novelist, has taught for decades in American universities, including most recently at Princeton.
About the Author
Ricardo Piglia, one of the most prominent authors of the entire Spanish-language world, was born in Buenos Aires in 1940 and grew up on Mar del Plata. He studied at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata where he majored in history and graduated in 1965. Early in his career, Piglia was connected to the important literary and political magazine
Los Libros (1968-1974) and in 1968 began the publication of his first edited collection of detective novels:
La Serie Negra. Piglia also established himself as a writer of short stores and was the recipient of distinguished awards. His fiction grapples with the meaning of social and political processes as is evident in the stories collected in the volume
Assumed Name, published in English in 1995. Two of his books (
Assumed Name and
Plata quemada) have inspired films. His novel
La ciudad ausente was adapted for opera and shown at The Colón Opera House of Buenos Aires, with music by Gerardo Gandini. He received innumerable prizes for his works and for his lifetime's body of literature, including the Casa de las Américas Prize for
La invasión, the Boris Vian Prize for
Artificial Resperation, the Nacional Prize for
La ciudad ausente, the Planeta Prize for
Plata quemada, the Premio Iberoamericano de las Letras José Donoso, and for
Target in the Night the Romulo Gallegos Prize and the National Critics Prize.
A literary critic, essayist, and professor, Piglia taught for several decades at American universities, including at Princeton for fifteen years. As professor, Piglia teaches Spanish American Literature, with special emphasis on 19th and 20th centuries intellectual and cultural history in the Río de la Plata. Interested in literary theory and theory of the novel he has given seminars about Sarmiento, Onetti, Borges, Arlt, Puig, as well as on "Paranoid fiction. The detective genre in Latin American" and "Poetics of the novel in Latin America. He currently holds the Walter S. Carpenter Professor of Language, Literature and Civilization of Spain at Princeton.
Sergio Waisman is Professor of Spanish and International Affairs at The George Washington University, where he has been teaching since 2003. He is also Affiliated Faculty of Judaic Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley (2000), and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1995). Prof. Waisman's book Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery was published in the US by Bucknell and in Argentina by Adriana Hidalgo (both in 2005). Sergio Waisman has translated six books of Latin American literature, including The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia (Duke Univ. Press), for which he received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award in 2000. His first novel, Leaving, was published in the U.S. in 2004 (Intelibooks), and in 2010 as Irse in Argentina (bajo la luna). His latest translations are The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela (2008, Penguin Classics) and An Anthology of Spanish-American Modernismo (2007, MLA, with Kelly Washbourne).