Life isn’t easy for a Parisian rat. But Gouri is getting by: with his best friend Rakä, he’s got a small business selling worms to pigeons, a cozy bachelor nest at the local florist, an—as spring blooms in the City of Lights—a budding love interest. But after a double date goes horribly wrong, Gouri and Rakä, along with the royal Rat Court—the princesses Iris and Catarina, and their hilariously unpredictable mother, the Queen of Rats—find themselves adrift on the Seine, accessories after the fact to a double homicide, using their new ally, a small human child, as a life raft. From there, the hijinks metastasize. French police collar the gang along with Mimile, a sadistic murderer who never remembers his crimes. But having escaped lock-up (from the cell they'd been tossed into with their arch-enemies, a snake and a terrier), they pay a visit to the God of Man (a homeless recluse hiding out in the Sainte-Chapelle), but then the giant Rat Devil makes his appearance, full of fiery flatulence and threatening cataclysm…City of RatsCity of Rats
Born in Buenos Aires in 1939, Raúl Damonte Botana derived his sobriquet
Copi from a nickname his grandmother gave him, "copita de nieve," or "little snowflake." At 17, he went into exile in Haiti, Uruguay, and New York before finally settling in Paris, where he was a cartoonist, performer, playwright, and novelist. In his own words, Copi was "an amoral commentator, brilliantly ignorant, who writes about sex with unusual violence." He died of an AIDS-related illness in 1987.
Poet, translator, and book designer Kit Schluter lives in Mexico City. He is author of the short story collection Cartoons, and his acclaimed translations from the French and Spanish include books by Rafael Bernal, bruno darío, Felisberto Hernández, and Marcel Schwob.
César Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires (about Copi and Rimbaud) and at the University of Rosario (Constructivism and Mallarmé), and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, and certainly one of the most talked about in Latin America, Aira has published more than 100 books to date in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Spain, which have been translated for France, Great Britain, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Greece, Austria, Romania, Russia, and the United States. One novel,
La prueba, has been made into a feature film, and
How I Became a Nun was chosen as one of Argentina's ten best books. Besides essays and novels Aira writes regularly for the Spanish newspaper
El País. In addition to winning the 2021 Formentor Prize, he has received a Guggenheim scholarship, and was shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos prize and the Booker International Prize.
