Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was     by Angelica Gorodischer, Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin Original language: Spanish Country: Argentina   Published by Small Beer Press Pub. Date: August 15, 2003 Format: Paperback ISBN: 1931520054 List Price: $16.00 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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Kalpa Imperial is the first of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer's nineteen award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial's multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories.

New: Read a chapter: "The End of a Dynasty or The Natural History of Ferrets"

But Kalpa Imperial is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and acclaimed writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who has translated Kalpa Imperial, are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. Kalpa Imperial is a powerful introduction to the writing of Angélica Gorodischer, a novel which will enthrall readers already familiar with the worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin.

"The only thing more amazing than the stories about this nonexistent empire is the fact that it has taken them so long -- twenty years -- to appear in English."
-- Scifidimensions

"It's always difficult to wrap up a rave review without babbling redundant praises. This time I'll simply say "Buy this Book!""
-- Locus

"The elaborate history of an imaginary country...is Nabokovian in its accretion of strange and rich detail, making the story seem at once scientific and dreamlike."
-- Time Out New York

Kalpa Imperial has been awarded the Prize "Más Allá" (1984), the Prize "Sigfrido Radaelli" (1985) and also the Prize Poblet (1986). It has had four editions: Minotauro (Buenos Aires), Alcor (Barcelona), Gigamesh (Barcelona), and Planeta Emecé Editions (Buenos Aires).

Praise for the Spanish-language editions of Kalpa Imperial:

Angélica Gorodischer has blended to perfection such wide ranging influences within fantastic literature in this century as those of Borges, Calvino and Kafka, with a voice of her own. . . . Angélica Gorodischer is the indisputable pride of the Argentinean literature. . . . Gorodischer's voice is full of wisdom, or in other words, humility: it never weighs on her story telling the danger of allegory, not once is there an attempt to pass judgement on the real world from fiction, but to imagine the world's multiple possibilities and thus come to an understanding -- its cruelest aspects included -- of the richness of its diversity.
-- Mariana Amato, La Nación, Buenos Aires

Angélica Gorodischer, both from without and within the novel, accomplishes the indispensable function Salman Rushdie says the storyteller must have: not to let the old tales die out; to constantly renew them. And she well knows, as does that one who met the Great Empress, that storytellers are nothing more and nothing less than free men and women. And even though their freedom might be dangerous, they have to get the total attention of their listeners and, therefore, put the proper value on the art of storytelling, an art that usually gets in the way of those who foster a forceful oblivion and prevent the winds of change.
-- Carmen Perilli, La Gaceta, Tucuman

At a time when books are conceived and published to be read quickly, with divided attention in the din of the subway or the car, this novel is to be tasted with relish, in peace, in moderation, chewing slowly each and every one of the stories that make it up, and digesting it equally slowly so as to properly assimilate it all.
-- Rodolfo Martinez

A vast, cyclical filigree . . . Gorodischer reaches much farther than the common run of stories about huge empires, maybe because she wasn't interested in them to begin with, and enters the realm of fable, legend, and allegory.
--Luis G. Prado, Gigamesh, Barcelona