Hola.

We’re thrilled to welcome you to the Buenos Aires Review.

It’s taken a long, hectic, dizzying, beautiful year to get this project off the ground. We started the BAR because we just couldn’t ignore the opportunity and the need for it: we were in the middle of the vibrant artistic and intellectual community of Buenos Aires at the same time digital publishing was making cultural exchange across countries and continents possible in a way unthinkable before. But we couldn’t have done it alone. We’re deeply grateful to all our writers, translators, artists, and advisors, as well as to our Associate Editors, who helped shepherd this publication into being.

—Las Editoras

In our inaugural selection:

David Leavitt takes us on a tour of the hedonistic world of 1930s Paris in “The Reversal Spell”
Giovanna Rivero channels rural Bolivia in “Smoke”
Champion of international lit John Freeman shares his poems “Oslo,” “The Heat,” and “Unknowing”
Ariel Schettini explores our collective animal side in “Shade Sails,” “Return to Origin,” “The Kissers,” and “Foxes of London”
Mariano López Seoane looks at the politics behind Evita’s glamour
Dorothy Spears, our favorite art critic for The New York Times, publishes her first short story
Javier Calvo and Mara Faye Lethem talk translation and trends
Joshua Edwards and Lincoln Michel present luminous, distinctly contemporary, work

Plus:

Junot Díaz chats with Karen Cresci about getting caught between languages
Milton Läufer shares the secret of a classic Buenos Aires bookstore
Maxine Swann reviews Zadie Smith’s NW

Not to mention:

Images by Belén Bejarano, Sofía Flores Blasco, Carmen Burguess, Eduardo Carrera, Gisèle Freund, Christos Katsiaouni, Marisela LaGrave, Maximiliano Murad, and Lucía Vassallo

Translations by Pablo Ambrogi, Heather Cleary, Carlos Freytes, Addie Leak, Valeria Meiller, Lucas Mertehikian, John Oliver Simon, Rodrigo Marchán, Santiago Martorana, and Rachel Small

Don’t be a stranger. We’ll be adding new material every week.

Coming soon: curator and art critic María Gainza tells us about her own private Rothko, and Aaron Thier offers a haunting meditation on the Aberdeen Bestiary. Then there’s a fabulous ebook dossier with writing from and about the inscrutable Mario Bellatin.