Ricardo Piglia

Ricardo Piglia (November 24, 1941 in Adrogué – January 6, 2017 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine author, critic, and scholar best known for introducing hard-boiled fiction to the Argentine public. Born in Adrogué, Piglia was raised in Mar del Plata. He studied history in 1961-1962 at the National University of La Plata.

Ricardo Piglia published his first collection of fiction in 1967, La invasión. He worked in various publishing houses in Buenos Aires and was in charge of the Serie Negra which published well-known authors of crime fiction including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis and Horace McCoy. A fan of American literature, he was also influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, as well as by European authors Franz Kafka and Robert Musil.

Piglia's fiction includes several collections of short stories as well as highly allusive crime novels, among them Respiración artificial (1980, trans. Artificial Respiration), La ciudad ausente (1992, trans. The Absent City), and Blanco nocturno (2010, trans. Nocturnal Target). His criticism has been collected in Criticism and Fiction (1986), Brief Forms (1999) and The Last Reader (2005).

Piglia resided for a number of years in the United States. He taught Latin American literature at Harvard as well as Princeton University, where he was Walter S. Carpenter Professor of Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain from 2001 to 2011. After retirement he returned with his wife to Argentina.

In 2013 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; he died of the disease on January 6, 2017, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.