Promotional Information

A brand new collection of Silvina Ocampo's wildly surreal stories that affirms the author's position as one of the most important Argentine authors of the 20th century. Admired by Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges, Ocampo's stories are now available for discovery and rediscovery.

About the Author

Silvina Ocampo (1903 - 1993) was an Argentine poet, fiction writer, translator, and one-time playwright. Born into an elite Buenos Aires family, she studied art in Paris under Fernand Leger and surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico before marrying fellow Buenos Aires author Adolfo Bioy Casares. Ocampo published several volumes of short stories and poetry, as well as collaborative anthologies with Bioy Casares and close friend Jorge Luis Borges. NYRB Poets will be publishing a collection of Ocampo's poetry in Spring 2015. Daniel Balderston is the Mellon Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the editor of Variaciones Borges, and a scholar of Borges, Southern Cone literature, Brazilian literature, and Latin American gender and sexuality studies. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine short story writer, poet, and essayist. His fiction, which drew on his interest in mathematics and detective stories, made him one of the influential writers of the twentieth century. English-language anthologies of his stories include Ficciones, The Aleph, and Labyrinths. Helen Oyeyemi is a British author. She has written four novels, including White is for Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, and most recently Boy, Snow, Bird.

Reviews

She lived a little in the shadow of her sister Victoria on the one hand and of her husband Bioy Casares and Borges on the other. She was an extravagant woman when writing her stories, short and crystalline, she was perfect. -- Cesar Aira Ocampo wrote with fascinated horror of Argentinean petty bourgeois society, whose banality and kitsch settings she used in a masterly way to depict strange, surreal atmospheres sometimes verging on the supernatural. The Independent Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature. -- Jorge Luis Borges Silvina Ocampo is, together with Borges and Garcia Marquez, the leading writer in Spanish. -- Jorge Amado Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvelous. Other than Silvina Ocampo, I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time or in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor. -- Alberto Manguel