BOMB Magazine interviews César Aira:

MM The poet Arturo Carrera, who is also from Pringles and was going to the same libraries, took note of you as a reader because one day he went to ask for something by Kafka and you had it out. It was the first of Kafka’s works for him, but you had already been through the whole gamut.

CA My intellectual contact with Arturo began in our adolescence, but he’s a different reader. I’m a narrative reader who searches for a good story, and he’s a poetic reader who searches for a good word. I recommended a Balzac novel to Arturito, he read it a bit reluctantly and later said to me, “I loved the part where it says ‘the little salted spoon’!”