The best of contemporary Argentine author Cecilia Pavón's short
stories.
Poet, writer and translator Cecilia Pavón emerged in the late 1990s as
one of the most prolific and central figures of the young Argentine
literary scene--the so-called Generation of the 90s: artists and writers
whose aesthetics and politics were an earnest response to the disastrous
impact of American-exported neoliberal policies and the resulting
economic crisis of 2001. Their publications were fragile--xeroxed,
painted on cardboard--but their cultural impact, indelible.
A cofounder of Buenos Aires's independent art space and publishing press
Belleza y Felicidad--where a whole generation of soon-to-be-famous
Argentine artists showed for the first time--Pavón pioneered the use of
unpoetic and intimate content, her verses often lifted from text
messages or chatrooms, her tone often impish, yet brutally sincere.
Fellow Argentine poet Marina Yuszczuk once wrote, Pavón's writing is
filled with minor illuminations and conjectures; her syntax is the
syntax of commas, 'buts, ' and disjunctives, thoughts and impressions
organized into a current that flows, branches off, and stands still.
In 2015, Pavón's first volume of collected poems, A Hotel With My
Name, was published in English. Contemporary writers in the US,
Australasia and Europe discovered a deep affinity with her work. Pavón's
protagonists, Ariana Reines noted, are absolute women, guileless
dreamers, saints in sneakers, on sidewalks, in jail, in Zara, on buses,
in nightclubs, in bed.
Translated by Pavón's own poetic protégé Jacob Steinberg, Little Joy
collects the best of Pavón's short stories written between 1999-2020,
originally published in three volumes in Spanish.
