Evasión y otros ensayos

Comprising five essays, *Evasion and Other Essays* explores narrative form and content, the creative process, and the function of literature—all fundamental themes for the Argentine author. Whether championing the entertaining fiction of authors like Stevenson, as in "Evasion," or praising the pleasurable "uselessness" of literature in "Brief Discourse," the essay with which he inaugurated the 2016 Berlin Literature Festival, César Aira's essays are both luminous and incisive. The literary procedure proposed by Raymond Roussel, his avant-garde mentor, and the essay analyzing the concept of "genius" through the figure of Salvador Dalí, another of his great models, complete this volume, an extraordinary collection that concludes with another gem from Aira: an essay on the very nature of the essay.