The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine by Mario Levrero

Levrero’s writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination, and nowhere more so than in this 1970 story collection. From the Escher-like grammatical maze of ‘The Boarding House’ to the Lewis Carroll-esque ‘The Basement’, this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility. ‘Stories that play with space, an absurd space when looked at with logic.

And that is exactly the challenge that Levrero sets the reader: to read from their imagination, from that place where anything is possible, where fears, phobias and obsessions have free rein.’ Tati Jurado