An NYRB Classics Original First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature.   Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good.   Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama , with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose. " Zama remains the most attractive of Di Benedetto's books, if only because of the crazy energy of Zama himself, which is vividly conveyed in Esther Allen's excellent translation." —J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books "An ardent fan of Dostoyevsky, Di Benedetto is given to portraying states of extremity—of obsession, delusion, wild aggression—but without any nineteenth-century rhetorical overheating. . . Zama has been described as a work of existentialist fiction, and its protagonist, alone with a troubled mind, is as much an ambassador from the twentieth century as a Baroque-era bureaucrat. As with novels by Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and Beckett, the story's preoccupation is the tension between human freedom and constraining circumstance . . . . The belated arrival of Zama in the United States raises an admittedly hyperbolic question: Can it be that the Great American Novel was written by an Argentinean? It's hard, anyway, to think of a superior novel about the bloody life of the frontier." —Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker “Di Benedetto’s narrators cannot take hold of anything, even their own callousness. They falter; they flicker; they do not coalesce...It is hard to imagine a more prescient meditation on the dizzying senselessness of suffering.” —Becca Rothfeld, Bookforum “[A] haunting novel about solitude and self-destruction that is both earthly and oneiric. Di Benedetto was influenced by Dostoyevsky and Kafka. But he also had much to say about the Latin American condition. . . . In place of baroque magic realism, Di Benedetto writes in sharp, modern, deceptively simple prose. . . . he was a bridge between Jorge Luis Borges, with his mental labyrinths, and Roberto Bolaño, a peripatetic Chilean whose work explored both the condition of the writer and chronic violence in Latin America.” —Michael Reid, The Economist "Available in English for the first time, this 1956 classic of Argentine literature presents a riveting portrait of a mind deteriorating as the 18th century draws to a close. . . . The final images of the novel are haunting and unforgettable. This extraordinary novel, whose English translation has been so long in coming, is a once and future classic." — Publishers Weekly , starred review "A surprisingly modern existential portrait of a tortured soul." — BBC "[Di Benedetto] has written essential pages that have moved me and that continue to move me." —Jorge Luis Borges "Di Benedetto is the rare novelist who doesn’t seek to reconstruct the past to prove a point. He lives the past, and exposes us to experiences and forms of behavior that retain all their weirdness." —Julio Cortázar "So many great books arrive late, or never, in English. High on the list is Zama , one of the best books written in Spanish during the second half of the twentieth century." — Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker 's Page Turner blog "[An] exquisite, new, and much-belated translation of Zama ." — Ratik Asokan , The Nation "[R]ead it above all for the triumph of its style: Zama holds forth in deep, stewing paragraphs as pompous as they are incisive. It’s Sartre by way of J. Peterman, and in Esther Allen’s translation it still feels unique and alive.” —Dan Piepenbring, Paris Review Daily "This year's release of Antonio Di Benedetto’s masterpiece is a literary event of great importance, and it puts an end to an unjust historical neglect." —Daniel Saldaña París, Publishers Weekly "This is a book that I could see myself reading many times, and always profiting from, seeing it each time as if was reading a whole other book. . . . Read it. Zama has been worth waiting 7 years for." —Scott Esposito, Conversati