{"product_id":"thus-were-their-faces-isbn-9781590177679","title":"Thus Were Their Faces","description":"An NYRB Classics Original\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThus Were Their Faces\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world’s most individual and finest.\u003cp\u003e\"These stories are feverish, cruel, and wry, set among the surrealisms of puberty, disability, and precarity.\" —Joshua Cohen, \u003ci\u003eHarper's\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” —César Aira\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Dark, masterly tales...a (very good) introduction...a (very good) translator...Ocampo’s technique is beyond all reproach; an author has to keep masterly control when letting events veer off beyond the quotidian (the phrase 'magic realism' seems inadequate when applied to her).”  —Nicholas Lezard, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.”  —\u003ci\u003eThe Independen\u003c\/i\u003et\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.” —Jorge Luis Borges\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Silvina Ocampo is, together with Borges and García Márquez, the leading writer in Spanish.” —Jorge Amado\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Unsettling and off-kilter, revelatory and readable.” —A.N. Devers, \u003ci\u003eLongreads\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Magical….Ocampo’s earlier words resonate now with something of the 'clairvoyance' Borges once attributed to her….Mind-blowing hallucinogenic lines…make it important to take the stories in small, slow doses lest we zip by and miss them.” —Jill Schepmann, \u003ci\u003eThe Rumpus\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ocampo mixes unembellished narration and dark, fantastic elements into a heady cocktail.” —Heather Cleary, \u003ci\u003eLit Hub\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sublime poet and eminent master of the modern fantastic—her heirs include Julio Cortázar, who praised her ability to summon the strangeness in the everyday, Roberto Bolaño, who declared that he “would live very happily in Silvina Ocampo’s kitchen,” and César Aira—Ocampo deserves to be heralded alongside the greatest Latin American authors of the 20th century…. her prose is intimate and precise, alert to detail…. Her poetic voice is often tranquil…. Yet when her poetry wanders into the terrain of people, Ocampo exhibits emotional dexterity and arresting candidness.” —Jose Teodoro,\u003ci\u003e National Post \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Every story [evokes] a fantastic atmosphere – at once creepy and inviting. Ocampo is a literary angler, drawing her piscine audience closer to the hook with every mysterious sentence until we bite at the bait and she reels us in….Within is a strange world all its own, with memorable characters and elegant prose. It is worthy of becoming a popular classic and not just a forgotten footnote in Argentinian literature.” —Kenyon Ellefson, \u003ci\u003ePortland Book Review \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In the dark world of Ocampo’s fiction, the familiar yet unsettling imagery of fantasy has a sense of reality that reality itself often lacks…. Ocampo can be cruel and cynical, but her spitefulness is clever, and, at her best moments, something tender lurks beneath the sadism. The punishments she cooks up for her characters are presented with unmistakable irony, and the results are frequently comedic and not infrequently touching.” —Becca Rothfeld, \u003ci\u003eBookforum \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Ocampo's] poetic sentences apply just the right pressure to turn everyday details vivid, but not lurid…it is time for Ocampo’s dark star to rise. —Scott Esposito, \u003ci\u003eMusic and Literature \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Part of the pleasure of reading Ocampo – or rather the thrill, as some of her work is far from pleasurable – is never knowing what the next sentence will bring… Illogic and paradox shoot from the strange soil of her fiction, where dark, perturbing situations thrive… The range of Ocampo’s invention is impressive… Ocampo creates recognisable domestic settings that she then infects with strangeness. In her world a birthday party can become a funeral, objects collected in dreams can be brought into the waking world, and lovers flirt by exchanging stories of death.” —Chris Power,\u003ci\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eSilvina Ocampo\u003c\/b\u003e (1903–1993) was born to an old and prosperous  family in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six sisters. After studying  painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger 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, \u003ci\u003eViaje olvidado\u003c\/i\u003e (Forgotten Journey), appeared in 1937; the first of her seven volumes of poems, \u003ci\u003eEnumeración de la patria\u003c\/i\u003e (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 writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky once  wrote, “For decades, Silvina Ocampo was the best kept secret of  Argentine letters.” \u003ci\u003eSilvina Ocampo: Selected Poems \u003c\/i\u003eis published by NYRB\/Poets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDaniel Balderston\u003c\/b\u003e is Andrew W. Mellon Professor  of Modern Languages at the University of  Pittsburgh, where he chairs the Department of Hispanic Languages and  Literatures and directs the Borges Center. He is currently completing  his seventh book on Borges, titled \u003ci\u003eHow Borges Wrote\u003c\/i\u003e. He has edited numerous books, including \u003ci\u003eVoice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature\u003c\/i\u003e, and has also translated books by José Bianco, Juan Carlos Onetti, Sylvia Molloy, and Ricardo Piglia.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHelen Oyeyemi\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of five novels, including \u003ci\u003eWhite Is for Witching\u003c\/i\u003e, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award; \u003ci\u003eMr. Fox\u003c\/i\u003e, which won a 2012 Hurston\/Wright Legacy Award; and most recently \u003ci\u003eBoy, Snow, Bird\u003c\/i\u003e. In 2013, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJorge Luis Borges\u003c\/b\u003e (1899–1986), a giant in Latin American letters, wrote numerous books of  poetry, fiction, and essays, and was a prodigious translator of authors  such as Kipling, Woolf, Faulkner, and Poe. He was a regular contributor  to Victoria Ocampo’s journal \u003ci\u003eSur\u003c\/i\u003e, and a frequent dinner guest of  Silvina Ocampo and Bioy Casares. Over one of their legendary  conversations, the three friends came upon the idea of editing the \u003ci\u003eAntología de la Literatura Fantástica\u003c\/i\u003e, which was published in 1940.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299955331301,"sku":"NP9781590177679","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590177679.jpg?v=1767742609","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/thus-were-their-faces-isbn-9781590177679","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}