Julio Cortázar

"Diary of Andres Fava is pure reflection: on his reading, dreams, conversations, and writing. This unpredictable journal of the protagonist of Julio Cortazar's posthumously published El Examen is peppered with quotes from French poets and American jazzmen. Exploratory and honest, Diary of Andres Fava lets us in on his own intimate reflections on literature, music, friendship, love, and the act of writing."--BOOK JACKET.

An Argentine writer living in Paris describes his life and reveals the internal monologues and musings that make his world.

"The Instruction Manual," the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. "Unusual Occupations," the second chapter, describes the obsessions and predilections of the narrator's family, including the lodging of a tiger-just one tiger- "for the sole purpose of seeing the mechanism at work in all its complexity." Finally, the "Cronopios and Famas" section delightfully characterizes, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, "those enemies of pomposity, academic rigor mortis and cardboard celebrity-a band of literary Marx Brothers."

"Seven stories from Cortázar's volume Deshoras (see HLAS 48:5600). Useful afterword by Manguel places work in biographical, literary, and political context. Powerful, often fantastic narrations told from different points of view, compellingly translated by Manguel. Important contribution to Cortázar bibliography in English"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

"Final Exam, one of Julio Cortazar's early novels, is his allegorical, bitter, and melancholy farewell to an Argentina from which he was about to be permanently self-exiled. (Cortazar moved to Paris the following year.)". "The setting of Final Exam is a surreal Buenos Aires, dark and eerie, where a strange fog has enveloped the city to everyone's bewilderment. Juan and Clara, two students at a Faculty called "The House" (the Great Books are read aloud there by so-called Readers), meet up with their friends Andres and Stella, as well as a journalist friend they call "the chronicler." Juan and Clara are getting ready to take their final exam, but instead of preparing, they wander the city with their friends, encounter strange happenings in the squares and ponder life in cafes. All the while, they are trailed by the mysterious Abel, apparently a former lover of Clara's."--BOOK JACKET.

All Fires the Fire offers eight great examples of the creative fullness that encompasses Cortázar's stories. From the exasperated metaphor of human relationships that is "La autopista del sur" through the masterpiece that is "El otro cielo," Cortázar once again paves the way to stories that are a must-read for lovers of the story genre in general. "La salud de los enfermos," "Reunión," "La señorita Cora," "La isla a mediodía," "Instrucciones para John Howell," and "Todos los fuegos el fuego" are a celebration of intelligence, passion, and genius.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin I Love My Love / Helen Adam I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream / Harlan Ellison The Tattooer / Junichiro Tanizaki A Selection from Steps / Jerzy Kosinski Axolotl / Julio Cortazar [Wish]( / Roald Dahl The Lottery / Shirley Jackson It's a Good Life / Jerome Bixby They Bite / Anthony Boucher The Last Night of the World / Ray Bradbury Born of Man and Woman / Richard Matheson Piazza Piece / John Crowe Ransom The South / Jorge Luis Borges The Fly / George Langelaan The Doll / Algernon Blackwood The Ghost / Richard Hughes The Hunted Beast / T. F. Powys End / Langston Hughes The Rival Dummy / Ben Hecht Caterpillars / E. F. Benson Lukundoo / Edward Lucas White Sredni Vashtar / Saki (H. H. Munro) The Picture un the House / H. P. Lovecraft Pollock and the Porroh Man / H. G. Wells The Spider / Hans Heinz Ewers The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains / Frederick Marryat Tcheriapin / Sax Rohmer My Doll Janie / Lola Ridge The Monkey's Paw / W. W. Jacobs The Mark of the Beast / Rudyard Kipling Manacled / Stephen Crane Yuki-Onna / Lafcadio Hearn Mujina / Lafcadio Hearn The Squaw / Bram Stoker The Yellow Wallpaper / Chalotte Perkins Gilman The Black Mass, Episode from La-bas (Down There) / J. K. Huysmans The Magic Shirt / Anonymous Carmilla / Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Not to Be Taken at Bed-time / Rosa Mulholland The Very Sad Tale of the Matches / Heinrich Hoffmann The Man-Tiger / Anonymous The Hours in the Life of a Lousy-Haired Man, Episode from Maldoror Varney, the Vampyre / James Malcolm Rymer The Horla / Guy de Maupassant A Carrion / Charles Baudelaire [Pit and the Pendulum]( / Edgar Allan Poe [Black Cat]( / Edgar Allan Poe [Birthmark]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne La Belle Helene / Prosper Merimee Nuckelavee / Anonymous La Bella Dame Sans Merci / John Keats Isabella, or The Pot Basil The Erl-King / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Count de Gernande, Episode from Justine / The Marquis de Sade Lord Randal / Anonymous The Painted Skin / P'u Sung-ling Satan at the Gates of Hell, from Paradise Lost, Book II / John Milton The Milk-White Doo / Anonymous The Wife of Usher's Well / Anonymous Bluebeard / Charles Perrault The Vampire, Episode from The Golden Ass / Lucius Apuleius Jael / Book of Judges

"A cargo de Jaime Alazraki, esta edición cuidadosamente anotada reproduce la segunda, de 1964 incluyendo un total de dieciocho relatos. Añade un glosario de argentinismos así como un artículo crítico del editor"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.