Five

A newspaper vendor in Buenos Aires dreams that his favorite soccer team, Racing, wins the championship, and soon the cheerful humdrum of his work-a-day life is tangled in a plot involving impoverished young mothers, millions of embezzled pesos, a sofa-bed factory store, "intestinal architecture," and (of course) cyber-nuns hell-bent on artificial procreation.

A young princess lives in a fairy-tale castle in the tropics. She is rich, with a vast property and a host of servants at her beck and call. Yet work she must: for she is a translator of pulp novels for piratical Latin American publishers, and quantity is the order of the day. Deadlines, however, aren't the only looming threat. General Winter and his sadistic sidekick, the Little Christmas Tree, have gathered a force to invade Princess Springtime's kingdom and steal the season for themselves.

Before going to sleep, a man plays a practical, private joke: he takes one of his wife's hormone pills. She never counts them, so she'll never know, and neither will anyone else: but he will. As he chuckles himself to sleep over his masterful prank, his perceptions begin to expand, and soon it's far from clear where the joke ends, and reality begins . . .

At last, a hearty and delicious five-course feast by the incredible novelist C廥ar Aira, hailed as "the Duchamp of Latin America" (Natasha Wimmer) and"an exquisite miniaturist" (The Wall Street Journal). Five brings together the novels Margarita: A Memory, The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, and Princess Springtime, as well as a short story, "The Hormone Pill." From thriller to distraction-catnip to conceptual memoir, the many facets of Aira's multifarious genius are on full display, and in every one, Aira dazzles as he turns expectations inside-out and gleefully explodes genre conventions. Five is a must-have for fans and a fine introduction to the as-yet uninitiated.