by María Gainza
translated by Thomas Bunstead
From the acclaimed author of Optic Nerve and Portrait of an Unknown Lady, a stunning collection of stories exploring the way works of art move both through the physical world and the cultural imagination
One night in Buenos Aires, during the filming of Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola told María Gainza, ‘An artist comes into the world with a quiver of golden arrows’ – to be shot all in one go in youth, or slowly across an entire lifetime.
A Handful of Arrows is a masterpiece of miniatures, a collection of glimpses into the lives of artists: in it, you’ll find a watercolour by Cézanne stolen from a Buenos Aires museum, a walk along Thoreau’s Walden Pond, the cosmopolitan life and memories of sculptor María Simón, the travels of painter Francis Hopkinson and his assistant Moon in Mexico, a cursed painting by Titian – and, flickering in and out of view, an elusive writer and critic named María Gainza.
Full of gems and curiosities, and straddling the line between fiction and essay, María Gainza’s luminous book finds new ways of understanding art and history, breaking down genre barriers and inviting readers into a rich, kaleidoscopic world.
‘María Gainza is a writer of startling intelligence and agility. In A Handful of Arrows, artists become the characters in a secret kind of novel, an inside-out novel about memory and forgetting that will leave every reader disturbed, enriched and delighted.’ Adam Thirlwell
MARÍA GAINZA was born in Buenos Aires, where she still lives. A longtime art critic, she has worked at The New York Times’ Buenos Aires bureau and written for ArtNews, Artforum, and others. Her debut novel, Optic Nerve, was named one of The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the Year and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her second novel, Portrait of an Unknown Lady, won the 2019 Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She has received Konex Awards in the Visual Arts (2017) and Novel (2024) categories, and the Narrative Prize of the Argentine Academy of Letters (2026). Her work has been translated into 19 languages. A Handful of Arrows is her most recent book.
THOMAS BUNSTEAD is a translator of leading Spanish-language authors, including Rodrigo Blanco Claderón, Agustín Fernández Mallo and Enrique Vila-Matas. Among other honours, he is a former Royal Literary Fellow and the recipient of the Cercador Prize, the McGinnis-Ritchie Award, an O. Henry Prize, and two PEN Translates Awards. He lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales.