An irreverent picaresque, All Night Movie follows the adventures of a young woman determined to conquer the world. A rogues' gallery of labor union leaders, cultists, lesbians, murderers, ne'er-do-wells, prostitutes, and visitors to a disconcertingly erotic telephone booth accompany the picara as she pushes the limits established in patriarchal postdictatorship Argentina. With lyric prose, Alicia Borinsky creates a hypnotic kaleidoscope of voices--a tantalizing and illuminating mix of the pop culture, politics, sexuality, tango, and cinema of an enigmatic society that celebrates its own demise.

Alicia Borinsky, winner of the 1996 Latino Literature Award for Fiction, writes in both English and Spanish. Her other books published in English include the novels Mean Woman (Nebraska, 1993) and Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer (Nebraska, 1998), the poetry collections The Collapsible Couple (Middlesex, 2000) and Timorous Women (Spectacular Diseases, 1991), and a volume of literary criticism, Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical Dream in Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Pennsylvania, 1993). She is currently professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature at Boston University.

Cola Franzen is the recipient of the 2000 Harold Morton Landon Prize in translation for Jorge Guillén's Horses in the Air (City Lights, 2000). She has translated Borinsky's Timorous Women (Spectacular Diseases, 1991), Mean Women (Nebraska, 1993), and Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer (Nebraska, 1998). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"No one else writing today can quite emulate her cartoon prose, a shot-gun marriage of comic and camp, the Borgesian and the Barthesian. Her eponymous heroine moves picaresquely from Momma Poppa family to a telephone booth of a hock -shop, the epitome of 'down-town glitter' from London to New York offering every kind of fix, including here black tulips sprouting not surely in homage to A. Dumas." —Peter Bush, Director, British Center for Literary Translation

"Alicia Borinsky is unique, with an Argentine ear perfectly attuned to tangos and boleros. Her All Night Movie renews and transforms the genre of the picaresque novel. Borinsky is the reincarnation of Macedonio Fernández and Julio Cortázar, as a daring and seductive storyteller in skirts." —Tomás Eloy Martínez, author of Santa Evita

"Embedded within the novel's complex circuits is also the idea that literature may be civilization's only means of affirming itself, stating unequivocally that, Yes, despite all the massacres, the plagues. . . , yes, here we go. We'd do it all over again." —Barbara Jamison, The Nation