Books by HEBE UHART
The Scent of Buenos Aires: Stories by Hebe Uhart
by HEBE UHART
“Seemingly naïve but tremendously sharp, Hebe Uhart’s vision is one that could belong to a child, but a child who has up her sleeve the reflective tools of an adult.” — Alejandra Costamagna
“These stories rarely adhere to conventional plots, but as mood pieces they're effective glimpses into the peculiarities of Uhart's characters, who crave order but usually concede that the world's default mode is disarray.” — Kirkus Reviews
The Scent of Buenos Aires is the first collection of Uhart’s to be published in English, drawing together her best vignettes of quotidian life, stories that sneak up on you. Refreshingly approachable, they are punctuated by street talk and saturated with a cryptic wit that recalls Lydia Davis.
In The Scent of Buenos Aires, Uhart renders moments at the zoo, the hair salon, or a homeowners association meeting with delightfully eccentric insight. These stories cast an unusual, intimate light on the inner lives of plants, animals, and humans, magnifying the minute, everyday quirks of Argentina’s small towns: a cat curls around his owner to humor him, a classroom of children sway like trees when their teacher turns her back. Smiling to herself, Uhart reveals the infinite ways we show ourselves to one another.
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Animals
by Simms Taback, Ingela P Arrhenius, Emma Jane Unsworth, HEBE UHART
Know someone who loves creatures? Animal lovers will fixate on this giant book presenting thirty-two big, bold images of friendly beasts.
From a star of children’s design in Sweden comes an exquisite array of animals rendered with whimsy and stylish splendor. Every oversize page highlights a different specimen, from an adorable sheep to an elegant flamingo, from an endearing hippo to a silly-looking snake. Each animal’s name appears in a different eye-catching type treatment, making for an attractive graphic keepsake sure to find a prominent place in nurseries and bookshelves everywhere.
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Animals
by Simms Taback, Ingela P Arrhenius, Emma Jane Unsworth, HEBE UHART
It is the moment every twenty-something must confront: the time to grow up. Adulthood looms, with all its numbing tranquility and stifling complacency. The end of prolonged adolescence is near.
Laura and Tyler are two women whose twenties have been a blur of overstayed parties, a fondness for drugs that has shifted from cautious experimentation to catholic indulgence, and hangovers that don't relent until Monday morning. They've been best friends, partners in excess, for the last ten years. But things are changing: Laura is engaged to Jim, a classical pianist who has long since given up the carousing lifestyle. He disapproves of Tyler's reckless ways and of what he percieves to be her bad influence on Laura. Jim pulls Laura toward adulthood and responsibility, toward what society says she should be, but Tyler isn't ready to let her go. But what does Laura want for herself? And how can she choose between Tyler and Jim, between one life she loves and another she's "supposed" to love?
Raw, uproarious, and deeply affecting, Animals speaks to an entire generation caught between late-adolescence and adulthood wondering what exactly they'll have to give up in order to grow up.
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Animals
by Simms Taback, Ingela P Arrhenius, Emma Jane Unsworth, HEBE UHART
Beloved illustrator Simms Taback's bright colors and bold illustrations bring a fresh look to beginning conceptboard books in Animals.
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Animals
by Simms Taback, Ingela P Arrhenius, Emma Jane Unsworth, HEBE UHART
“Hebe Uhart’s characters are made of an almost palpable material. They are alive, and they seem to emerge from the page to tell us, ‘This one here is me, that one over there could be you.’” — Alejandra Costamagna, The Paris Review
“Reading Hebe Uhart we laugh a lot, although we are never sure if what we’ve read is just a joke, because in her words there is also, above all, precision and wisdom . . .” — Alejandro Zambra
Hebe Uhart’s Animals tells of piglets that snack on crackers, parrots that rehearse their words at night, southern screamers that lurk at the front door of a decrepit aunt’s house, and, of course, human animals, whose presence is treated with the same inquisitive sharpness and sweetness that marks all of Uhart’s work.
Animals is a joyous reordering of attention towards the beings with whom we share the planet. In prose that tracks the goings on of creatures who care little what we do or say, a refreshing humility emerges, and with it a newfound pleasure in the everyday.
Watching a whistling heron, Uhart writes, “that rebellious crest gives it a lunatic air.” Birds in the park and dogs in the street will hold a different interest after reading Uhart’s blissful foray into playful zoology.
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A Question of Belonging: Crónicas
by HEBE UHART
"An exemplary compendium of brief glimpses into the quotidian concerns of everyday South Americans . . . [that] exudes the author’s characteristically bright insight and sense of attentive amusement." – Kirkus Reviews, starred review
25 Crónicas – uniquely Latin American short stories – from a master of the form, a star heralded alongside Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez for blending insight, honesty, and humor
Uhart reinvigorates our desire to connect with other people, to love the world, to laugh in the face of bad intentions, and to look again, more closely: from lapwings, road-side pedicures, and the overheard conversations of nurses and their patients, to Goethe and the work of the Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés.
“It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes,” Hebe Uhart writes in the opening story of A Question of Belonging, a collection of texts that traverse Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Spain, and beyond. Discoveries sprout and flower throughout Uhart’s oeuvre, but nowhere more so than in her crónicas, Uhart’s preferred method of storytelling by the end of her life. For Uhart, the crónica meant going outside, meeting others. It also allowed the mingling of precise, factual reportage and the slanted, symbolic narrative power of literature.
Here, Uhart opens the door on all kinds of people. We meet an eccentric priest who conducts experiments down by the riverside hoping to land on a cure for cancer; a queenly (read: beautiful and relentlessly indolent) teenage girl; a cacique of the Pueblo Nación Charrúa clan, who tells her of indigenous customs and histories.
She writes with characteristic slyness. In the last lines of the title story, Uhart writes, “And I left, whistling softly.” Wherever she may have gone, we are left with the wish we could follow alongside.
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$22.00