Thus Were Their Faces by Daniel Balderston

Thus Were Their Faces by Daniel Balderston

An NYRB Classics Original

Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer "better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us." Jorge Luis Borges flatly declared, "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature."

Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world's most individual and finest.

Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) was born to an old and prosperous family in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six sisters. After studying painting with Giorgio di Chirico and Fernand Lü¾Ž–”¼ger in Paris, she returned to her native city--she would live there for the rest of her life--and devoted herself to writing. Her eldest sister, Victoria, was the founder of the seminal modernist journal and publishing house Sur, which championed the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and in 1940 Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo were married. The first of Ocampo's seven collections of stories, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), appeared in 1937; the first of her seven volumes of poems, Enumeraciü¾Œ¶˜¼n de la patria (Enumeration of My Country) in 1942. She was also a prolific translator--of Dickinson, Poe, Melville, and Swedenborg--and wrote plays and tales for children. The Argentine critic Ezequiel Martü¾™†”¼nez Estrada wrote that everything in Silvina Ocampo's poetry carries with it her reminiscence of a lost paradise, of an inferno traveled in dreams. Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of Ocampo's stories and novellas, is published by NYRB Classics.

Jason Weiss is the author of five books, including Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk', the Most Outrageous Record Label in America and The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. Among his translations are the stories of Marcel Cohen and the poems of Luisa Futoransky. He lives in Brooklyn.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781590177679
ISBN 10	1590177673
Title	Thus Were Their Faces
Author	Daniel Balderston
Series	Nyrb Classics Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2015-01-27
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.