The Lives of the Typewriter and the Telephone

This article follows the publication of the essay «Hello? A requiem for the telephone» by Martin Kohan in the Russian magazine «Inostrannaya literatura»3 and anticipates the expected release of Miguel Vitagliano’s book «Engine room» in August of 2025. Although it is an interview with two distinguished voices of contemporary Argentine literature, those were originally two conversations carried out separately and at two different moments, which eventually could not but complement each other due to the affinity of the interviewees’ reflections on today’s world marked by the omnipresence of machines (smartphones, computers). Martín Kohan and Miguel Vitagliano, both novelists, winners of the Konex Literature Awards (2024), academics and literary critics, have been bound by close ties of friendship since, two decades ago, they founded Tantalia, an independent publishing house in Buenos Aires. The interview includes fragments of the texts that present another facet of their work, namely, the critical essay.