Credit Hand Lettering by Joel Holland.

“Picasso,” by César Aira, the story in this week’s issue, will be published by New Directions next year in a collection titled “The Musical Brain and Other Stories.” Barbara, you’re the publisher of New Directions. How did Aira’s work first come to your attention, and what was it that impressed you?

First, two editors visited about a decade ago from Beatriz Viterbo (an excellent Argentine publishing house named after a character in a story by Borges, whom we also publish), took a look at our list, and insisted we publish Aira. Then, only a few days later, my friend Francisco Goldman started in on me. I have a paper napkin from a bar where I noted down Francisco’s edict that New Directions must publish both Aira and Roberto Bolaño.

I do not read Spanish, so I started down the Aira rabbit hole by getting hold of his only book then in English. Pete Ayrton, of the great U.K. publisher Serpent’s Tail, had brought out “The Hare” in 1998, and it knocked my socks off. I couldn’t believe a writer could pull off so many literary sleights of hand. What I loved upon first reading “The Hare” is what I still love most of all about his writing: his delight in leaping into triple-back-flip dives from the very highest platform, even as the pool vanishes, to land neatly on his toes on a little patch of daisies. It is a very particular kind of joy. Key to his work is that it never feels like work—that’s part of the joy.  Aira possesses a sans souci quality I have never encountered with such purity.

But “The Hare” also started what grew into a small but quite marked lunacy-fringe aspect to publishing Aira. His current editor here, Laurie Callahan, who reads Spanish, and some of our favorite translators (in particular, Chris Andrews and Katherine Silver) started in on this ongoing and crazy process of deciding which ones to bring out, out of the hundred or so Aira books to choose from, and in which order.  We have never had an author present so many choices. It’s literally crazy.

I went on an editors’ trip to Buenos Aires after we’d published our first few Aira novels, and we were taken to visit a dozen Argentine publishing houses. At each one, the various visiting editors from around the world were asked which Argentine writers we publish, and I would say, for New Directions, Borges, Bioy Casares, and César Aira.  “We publish César Aira, too!” the Argentines exclaimed every time.

(Also, I met César Aira on that trip. For several weeks, he’d ignored my e-mails from New York asking if I could see him, until the morning I was flying off, when a brief note appeared—“I love all my publishers a priori”—saying that he’d pick me up at my hotel the next morning and show me the town.  He ran me through three museums in ninety minutes: it was the White Rabbit tour.  When we finally sat down and I could have a beer, I tried to talk to him about his own books, which turned out to be a dreadful idea.  We only started enjoying ourselves when he told me that his favorite English-language author is Muriel Spark.)

Like many of Aira’s stories, “Picasso” starts as a kind of thought experiment—What would happen if you were offered the choice of being Picasso or having a Picasso?—and takes it much further than most writers would. Can you tell us a little about the obsessive quality of Aira’s work?

Aira has often been quoted regarding his technique of the fuga hacia adelante (the flight forward), explaining that he constantly improvises and never rewrites. I don’t think that truly accounts for the sheer energy, much less the genius, of his writing, but that’s his own explanation. He bears some watching is all I’d say, and also that he owes something to Raymond Roussel, a writer I thinks he immensely admires.

Where does Aira fit in among the many Spanish-language writers New Directions has published? Can you place him in a tradition, or is he completely sui generis?

I think he fits in as a star within a constellation of our Spanish-language authors such as Borges, Bolaño (who much admired “the incredible César Aira,” saying that he “defies all classification”), Bioy Casares, Cortázar, Martín Adán, and Felisberto Hernández. I think they all have that elemental, irreducible, alchemical quality of genius.  But within that constellation he is such a distinctly colored, flickering star.

To me, the fact is that Aira takes sui generis to the level of soooo-eeeee PIGPIG genius.

Finally, would you rather have a Picasso or be Picasso?

That would depend on how long a view the Magic Milk Bottle genie might be willing to take. My wish would be to get an extra spin on the merry-go-round, but I’d only want to become Picasso once I was on my deathbed.  If the genie insisted I get slapped out of my world right now, then I’d rather have a Picasso.