LITTLE JOY
CECILIA PAVÓN
First Edition: 2021
Translated from Spanish to English
ISBN 978-1-63590-140-5
5.4 x 8 in., 200 pp.
Published by:
Semiotext(e)
South pasadena, CA
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 their work for the first time—Pavón pioneered the use of "unpoetic" and intimate content—her verses often lifted from text messages or chat rooms, her tone often impish, yet brutally sincere.
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.
REVIEWS
"Neither a slavish realist nor a full-blown fabulist, Pavón fashions her (with a few exceptions) “I’s” experience of the world in a register that is hard to pin down. Her narrators seem unassuming yet fearless, acutely receptive to both the beauty and noxiousness of life; impassioned, they can also be insouciant and deadpan.… Indeed, in her fiction Pavón constructs space for her narrators to think and feel in equal measure, resulting in beguiling revelations, which are always surprising even when the action of a story falls flat. As with Dorothea Lasky and Sheila Heti, Pavón prefers to use a bold and direct persona that is allowed to express all kinds of contradictions, a voice intoxicatingly and powerfully free.”
—Kate Wolf for Los Angeles Review of Books
"Ranging from art show pitches to item lists to parties in Buenos Aires and Berlin, Pavón’s selected stories read like an experimental prose poem. Her viscerally descriptive writing is drenched in her own experiences as a writer and translator in Buenos Aires, pulling her laptop out of her son’s wheely backpack to sit in a cafe and find poets to translate. In her own city, she’s found plenty: having previously run Belleza y Felicidad—a poetry center, art space, and small press in Buenos Aires in the 90s—Pavón most recently started Microcentro, a press and space dedicated entirely to hearing and reading poetry. In Little Joy, the different identities of the narrators are thirty riffs on identity with Pavón’s voice and immersion in Buenos Aires powering everything forward. Taken all together, these stories are a biting rebuttal of the ulcerous influence of neoliberalism on creativity and freedom in Argentina."
—Briana Byron for Full Stop
"Pavón’s prose is heterodox; her subjects shift according to the train of her thought, not mediated by a fixed idea, and not bound by the demands of content. She locates the spiritual in the quotidian but this has nothing to do with a concept of God. Her temporary utopias exist in an alternate reality, and writing is like a key to that world, composed of 'fragments of something much bigger or smaller that exists in another dimension.' Pavón’s temporary utopias can be found, as Baudelaire wrote, 'anywhere out of this world.'"
—Peter Valente for Talisman: A Journal in Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
"Tough and playful, yet radically sensitive, the typical Pavón narrator can’t quite wrap her head around the aftermath of Argentina’s Great Depression. Sure, the country is out of debt, but the urban renewal of Buenos Aires perplexes her, and the art scene seems nothing more than a flimsy tax evasion scheme. The stories are part critique, part confession… Praise be to Jacob Steinberg, whose translations capture the balancing act with grace."
—Quinn Roberts for The Drift
"Pavón's stories here are in the first-person, present-tense. They’re affectless and immediate. Her women record their lives in the streets and avenues. There are kids, music, food, shopping. The women are lost in the urban swell and sway, but they are not flaneurs or neutral observers. They are the ones life is happening to in too many messy ways. They are in search of utopia and might need to find it in a pair of sequined jeans. In ‘Nuns, the Utopia of a World Without Men,’ two young women go to the convent, not for the divine but for a world without bosses, and there happen upon a heaven of sorts."
—Jennifer Kabat for Frieze