Antonio Beneyto,
Còdols in New York

Translated by Stacy McKenna in collaboration with Carlota Caulfield.Published by Corner (an imprint of InteliBooks).

Softcover, perfect bound. 148 pages. Text in English and Spanish, with several b/w illustrations. ISBN: 0-9711391-7-2 List price: $14.95 Buy it from Amazon.com   Or, if you don't want to use your credit card, download Order Form (HTML) - (PDF)

About the Book

A flâneur is a a streetwise observer, a stroller, someone who rambles through a city without apparent purpose but feels tuned to the place and is constantly searching for adventure, aesthetic and erotic. In Còdols in New York, the Spanish writer Antonio Beneyto has created a protagonist, a persona of Beneyto himself, with a perspective reminiscent of the fin-de-siècle viewpoint of Baudelaire's French dandy and the obsessed Breton's surrealist flâneur. A passionate observer, whose immense pleasure is to take up residence in multiplicity, Beneyto's flâneur feels at home in the crowd and finds himself at the center of everything in the city. His flâneur, like a rolling stone, enters into the multitude as into an immense reservoir of electricity. New York suits him well. He immerses himself in the waves of the New York's crowds, gathers impressions and records in words and drawings his sightings and experiences. Ordinary beings, urban sites and events rise to a myriad of versions of the city. Beneyto takes pleasure everywhere.

Antonio Beneyto, who visited New York for long periods in the1980s and the mid-1990s, wandered through the streets and avenues, into parts of New York virtually unkown to visitors and indeed to many newyorkers. We meet street vendors, hookers, tourists, businessmen, musicians and all kind of peculiar characters, including Woody Allen. All are subjected to the artist's scrutinity, to his sharp pen. Beneyto visits cafés, night clubs, parks, shoeshops, pubs, taverns, restaurants, museums, monuments, bookstores, providing gossip and background to each site. But his Còdols is much more than an amusing kaleidoscope of the New York scene and the encounter with the unusual. His wild poetic vignettes are testimonies of the inner human drama of the American society.

-Carlota Caulfield, editor of Corner

Beneyto's eyes are the eyes of an avant-garde artist, those of a rebel, those of an heterodox, those of a minimalist. His eyes focus on the smallest thing, weak and maltreated- without forgetting his interest for what's artistic and astonishing, for the sensual and the unexpected. A land halfway between Apollinaire and the underground, between Ducasse and Vaché, between Ory and Groucho Marx, the poet spreads his net towards the five senses and towards what cannot be seen. How can it be explained, if not, that passion for the non-verbal communication, gestures, smells, that inundate his world?
I read with gusto this Còdols in New York. I know that "còdols" in Catalan are rocks smoothed by the river, rolling stones. Beneyto throws criticism and evokes beauty. The stones sing through Beneyto's mouth.

-Jaime D. Parra, author of Variaciones sobre Juan Eduardo Cirlot

About the Author

Antonio Beneyto's literary activity is diverse including many genres like travel books, novels, short stories, anthologies and essays. He lives in Barcelona, Spain