Description
Book SynopsisA collection of masterful short stories in Julio Cortazar's sophistocated, powerful and gripping style.
'Julio Cortázar is truly a sorcerer and the best of him is here, in these hilariously fraught and almost eerily affecting stories' Kevin Barry
A grieving family home becomes the site of a terrifying invasion. A frustrated love triangle, brought together by a plundered Aztec idol, spills over into brutality. A lodger’s inability to stop vomiting bunny rabbits inspires a personal confession.
As dream melds into reality, and reality melts into nightmare, one constant remains throughout these thirty-five stories: the singular brilliance of Julio Cortazar’s imagination.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY KEVIN BARRY
‘Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed’ Pablo Neruda
Trade ReviewA fecund mixture of surrealism, symbolism, nouveau roman experimentation and Borgesian fantasy, Cortázar enthusiastically seeds his realistic settings – for the most part split between Buenos Aires and Paris – with impossible invasions of the fantastical and supernatural. The effect is often a refined philosophical take on the "uncanny tales" strand of speculative fiction * Guardian *
Cortázar is one of the most distinctive voices in Latin American literature * Newsday *
Original...circuitous and powerful... Cortázar's method is to keep tight control over a world in which, just below the surface of charming, sophisticated social life, lies the unfaceable and unmentionable * Financial Times *
Cortázar can induce the kind of chilling unease that strikes like a sound in the night * Time *
A first-class literary imagination at work * The New York Times Book Review *
