Bestiary

A 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 *

Julio Cortazar lived in Buenos Aires for the first thirty years of his life, and after that in Paris. His stories, written under the dual influence of the English masters of the uncanny and of French surrealism, are extraordinary inventions, just this side of nightmare. In later life Cortazar became a passionate advocate for human rights and a persistent critic of the military dictatorships in Latin America. He died in 1984.

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