Julio Cortázar 
62: A Model Kit (New Directions Classic) 

First published in English in 1972 and long out of print, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar’s brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called ‘City.’

As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, ‘seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!’ It is the meeting place for a wild assortment of bohemians in a novel described by
The New York Times as ‘Deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious.’
Library Journal has said
62: A Model Kit is ‘a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time.’

Circa l’autore

Gregory Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, March 9, 1922. He grew up north of Hanover, NH, graduated from Dartmouth College, Class of 1944, Phi Beta Kappa, and got his MA, and Ph D at Columbia University after serving as a U.S. Army, Infantry, Staff Sgt during World War II. One of Latin American literature’s most distinguished translators, Gregory Rabassa translated more than thirty novels from Spanish and Portuguese into English — including works by Jorge Amado, Miguel Angel Asturias, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Most notably, he translated Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Among his many awards, Gregory Rabassa was a Fulbright Fellow, winner of the National Book Award for Translation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gregory Kolovakos Award, PEN. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at Queens College/CUNY and The Graduate School/CUNY.