La vida interior de las plantas de interior
Patricio Pron

SHORT STORIES | 2013 | 144 pages

A collection of stories in which the irreverent, the sweet and the disheartened coexist on its pages, with the bulk weighing on a set of stories about literature, books and literary creation. These stories offer up the central theme of THE INNER LIFE OF HOUSEPLANTS.

Henry David Thoreau once claimed that he had three chairs in his cabin in the woods in Walden: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up.”

No matter how many people are standing, the characters in THE INNER LIFE OF HOUSEPLANTS have only one chair: a woman who cries upon seeing the cover of an interior design magazine in a supermarket, an old man locked in the bathroom of an airplane that he thinks is going to crash, the judge of a provincial literary contest who finally discovers the genius writer he's always been looking for, a dog who appears in fifty-four paintings by Pablo Picasso and hates communists, an albatross that lives in the great Atlantic Garbage Patch, a prehistoric horse who thinks about Empedocles of Agrigento, a young girl who eats only dehydrated mashed potatoes, a writer who discovers the powers of fiction, a woman in a laundromat in Belgium who reads news of dead porn actresses, two aspiring writers who spin in the void and another who lives under the greatest living Argentine writer, a boy who cuts off his legs and face with a knife, two friends who make faces at clouds, a florist obsessed with an old client of hers, and a porn actor who runs away from himself. All the characters get blocked, but they also experience the freedom that this book promises, both to the characters and readers.

RIGHTS: spanish LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE

“The Inner Life of Houseplants is a book about the small, invisible threads that connect us and the chaos inherent to chance. A book that contains the beauty of the fragility of life inside it.”
— Aloma Rodríguez, El Heraldo de Aragón
“The humor, irony, wit and strong pull to play with the reader (in the double sense of making them take part and deliberately misleading them) make Pron a worthy heir to the rich tradition of Argentinian and Latin American short story writers, from Borges to Cortázar, Onetti, Quiroga and Juan Villoro. ”
— Daniel Genís, El Biblionauta
“Compared by many with the works of [Roberto] Bolaño, the stories of The Inner Life of Houseplants stand out for their wit, emotion and subtle irony. Stories about solitary characters that, however, speak of the inevitable social nature of our existence.”
— Jenesaispop
“[...] a powerful book with a convoluted title in which Pron manages to make the familiar seem strange; the
incredible, obvious; and the weird, normal.”
— Nicolás G. Recoaro, Tiempo Argentino
“In this book, Pron shows greater ease, humor and self-irony than in his previous books, as well as the confirmation of a unique style that converses with tradition without losing its pulse or originality.”
— Rodrigo Pinto, El Mercurio
“Brutal, moving and marvelous. Each story in The Inner Life of Houseplants reveals a different rhythm. [...] Pron’s talent is disquieting: his stories deal with extraordinary events in the midst of the mundane, or mundane events that become extraordinary, all paced with a rhythm that manages to connect the trivial and the fleeting with invisible threads...”
— María José Navia, Ticket de Cambio