"Alicia Kozameh’s 259 Leaps is a surprising, engaging, exhilarating book from a gifted writer with a major tale to tell—the contemporary experience of exile—not only because of her prison experience in Argentina and her wandering years in many countries, but because exile is, in this book, the very condition of language. Exile is the site of communication and the locus of speech; it is the excess of life that only language can shelter and host. The writer’s pilgrimage, thus, traces the construction of the book, and the book humanizes the space of exile." —Julio Ortega, professor, Brown University