Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Spanish (Argentina) by Chris Andrews – published July 2026

Here are five of Aira’s stories from the last 30 years that have previously not been translated into English. New Directions have taken on the task, with the job as well done as ever, by Chris Andrews, a regular translator of Aira’s work.

I am a passionate fan of Aira so was excited to see this published, five for the price of one it seemed.. well, not quite, as they are of very different lengths. The Dream is a full length novel, as I judge it anyway, at about 180 pages. The Hormone Pill is a short story, at just 8 pages. The others are I suppose, that word I don’t like, novellettes, at around 60 pages. Other than The Dream, a publisher can’t really justify selling the others as stand-alones, but still, it’s good value.

The strongest two stories will depend on what the reader likes about Aira’s writing, as he has great variety. The two that stood out for me, were The Dream and Princess Springtime, both have which have a significant amount of humour to them.

Margarita: A Memory 4/5
This is the restrained Aira. An unnamed narrator, scholarly and unworldly, recalls a summer spent with his extended family in the country before going to university in Buenos Aires. He meets his cousin, Margarita, for the first time, and she plays a big role in his maturity, though Aira resists heading in any direction that a typical coming-of-age story would.

The Dream 5/5
Mario works with his father at a newspaper kiosk in Buenos Aires, absorbed in the familiar routines of deliveries, and chats with regular customers such as the nuns at a nearby school. Then, as can happen in Aira’s books, the story erupts. Mario tries to rescue a young woman from a woman’s shelter and uncovers a conspiracy involving the nuns, who are secretly running a sinister operation involving robots and potentially even aliens. Everything that has happened before pales into insignificance, and though little Aira does surprises me these days, this actually did.

The Hormone Pill is just a short story. 3/5

Musical Brushstrokes 5/5

The narrator reminisces about the town’s only painter, a widower who, typical of Aira’s work, no longer paints. He designs and builds a pavilion where ghosts visit him; amongst them, his wife, a dwarf, and an itinerant philosopher. It’s the sort of thing Aira does really well, a musing on trying to create art when the desire to do so has been consumed by grief. It’s a simple story, and could easily have been longer than its sixty pages, as he depicts the patience of a man trying to reproduce the thing he cannot do.

Princess Springtime 5/5

A princess lives in a castle off the coast of Panama and translates cheaply produced pulp novels. (What a tremendous premise..)
All is calm in her life until soldiers invade, including one General Winter, and his lieutenant, Little Christmas Tree, wearing a uniform with blinking lights. The embalmed corpse of Vladimir Horowitz plays piano in a downstairs room of her residence. Absurdity abounds. In this sort of mood Aira loses focus on the plot and the piece becomes really just a series of vignettes, based around the madcap set of characters and the crazy world he has created.

It’s interesting that such a collection can include an author writing two such different stories as the last two.

These stories may have escaped translation and the publisher first time round, some date to 1995, but thankfully New Directions have given them a suitable ‘airing’ (pun intended..) here..

My GoodReads score 5 / 5