Edgar Cantero

Edgar Cantero is a writer and cartoonist from Barcelona who works in Catalan, Spanish, and English.

He is the author of The Supernatural Enhancements and the newly released Meddling Kids.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Cantero's reply:

I recently moved houses (actually, moved cities, from Barcelona to New York), and I was forced to leave all my books behind. All of them. If you wonder about their fate, I was supposed to rent a storage unit, but in the end, a good friend offered me the attic of his family’s house in his hometown in Pla d’Urgell. There they are, sleeping inches below the roof under a scorching sun.

I’ve been living in Brooklyn for eighteen days now, and in my room there are already five books.

John Le Carré’s Call From The Dead (1961) I read on the plane to the US after forgetting to send it to my friend’s attic with the rest. I could have abandoned it in Spain, but I liked the edition too much. It’s a Spanish translation printed like a pulp magazine. I knew Smiley already from the recent film with Gary Oldman, which I loved. I liked Le Carré’s style too: so melancholic, so anti-007.

Grady Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016) I bought at The Astoria Bookshop because Hendrix’s novels and mine always seem to be best friends in recommendation lists, so I was curious. And the paperback cover is amazing. All I can say about the book is that one scene is absolute genius. (If you have read it, you know which one. I doubt we’re thinking different scenes.) I will never forget it.

John Cheever’s Falconer (1977) I found in The Birch, a coffee shop in the Upper East Side. I always wanted to check out something else from Cheever after I read The Swimmer in college (I took one class on American contemporary literature, and I enjoyed it so much). Compared to the Cheever I remembered, Falconer was less magic and very bleak at first, but surprisingly ingenuous and powerful in the end.

Just this morning I found a collection of Stephen Crane’s writings sitting on a sidewalk on Lafayette Street, along with three other books. I picked up Crane’s because I’ve heard that The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is sort of a compulsory reading, and sometimes I fall for these things.

And in the afternoon I bought John Wyndham’s Chocky (1968) at Books Are Magic, in Cobble Hill.

Visit Edgar Cantero's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Supernatural Enhancements.

--Marshal Zeringue