Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) was an Argentine journalist and the author of five novels, the most well known being Zama, which is available from NYRB Classics. His first book, the story collection Mundo Animal, appeared in English translation in 1997 as Animal World.
Juan José Saer (1937–2005) was considered one of the most important Latin American authors to come after Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote several novels, a few of which are available in English, including The Regal Lemon Tree and The Witness.
Esther Allen received the 2017 National Translation Award for her translation of Antonio Di Benedetto's Zama. Co-founder of the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, she teaches at City University of New York's Graduate Center and Baruch College, where she directs the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. In 2006 the French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
"The Silentiary (1964) happens in a nameless Latin-American city during the years after World War II. A young man employed in mid-level management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary preconditions. It is the second of three novels by Antonio Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation in allusion to the dedication of the first one, Zama (1956), 'To the victims of expectation.' Together they constitute, in Juan Josâe Saer's words, 'one of the culminating moments of 20th-century narrative fiction in Spanish.'"--