About Ischia:
An intricate, gutsy, and raw novel, Ischia is populated with outsiders who navigate the vicissitudes of life in Argentina and the world. Ischia, the female narrator, is the youngest in a family of seven brothers and relates her experiences as she waits for a ride to the airport. Told through dizzying would-have, could-have conditionals, Ischia overlaps and blurs the past, present, and future of three young characters defined by their lack of certainty or expectation.
These three lives unfold between disenchantment and humor, and the narration transports readers into a world of memories, desires, and dreams. The novel advances lyrically through themes both solemn and lighthearted, shaping the contours of imagined, hilarious, and surreal experiences.
Ischia hearkens back to other notable Argentine literature written in the twentieth century by Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. In Heffes' world, the conditional tense controls the narrative, and readers only experience what would happen, not necessarily what does happen. This technique makes Ischia a novel that is difficult to stop reading and one that continues to play with form and style like other great Latin-American novels by authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Clarice Lispector, and Roberto Bolaño.
About Gisela:
Gisela Heffes is an award-winning author and Latin American Literature and Culture professor at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to her pioneer work in the field of ecocriticism and environmental humanities, she has published numerous books, essays, and articles on various topics, such as urban utopias, displacement and migration, motherhood, and Jewish Argentine literature.
Heffes’ debut novel, Ischia, was published in 2000 in Buenos Aires (Argentina). The novel, an experimental book about an unnamed narrator and protagonist who, along with her friends, wanders through the margins of different cities, especially Buenos Aires, searching for something they don’t know and seems unfathomable, has been translated and published in English with Dallas-based Deep Vellum Press. The first one of a trilogy, Ischia was followed by Praga (2001) and completed with Bruselas (published altogether in 2005).
Her bilingual works comprise the illustrated novella Sophie La Belle y las ciudades en miniatura / Sophie La Belle and The Miniature Cities (2016), and the poetry collection El cero móvil de su boca / The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020), translated to French, Portuguese, Sweden and German, which was praised for addressing the environmental crisis from an intimate and personal angle, especially the experience of extinction, the loss of biodiversity, and the way the future may look for our children.
