Whimsical and sinister, each story by Silvina Ocampo is like a knife of spun sugar that can still pierce between your ribs. A thief breaks into the house of a psychic with disastrous results, a bride has her personality subsumed by the previous occupant of her home, and two men switch destinies for a change of pace. The Impostor offers a comprehensive collection from one of the twentieth century's great forgotten woman writers. Here are tales of doubles and living dolls, angels and demons, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, and much else that is mad, sublime, and delicious. With an array spanning the length of Ocampo's career, these haunting stories are among the world's strangest and best.

The enormous body of short story anthologies from the nineteen countries of Spanish America and Brazil testifies to their importance for writers, editors, readers, and, especially, for schools and universities, teachers and students. The study of anthologies and their contents can be particularly revealing for many of the questions looming large in critical discourse, particularly those on canon formation and the relations between literature and cultural institutions; but researching this corpus is difficult because it varies greatly in quality, distribution, and format. The present volume for the first time gathers this mass of material and organizes it for systematic study. The main section comprises annotated listings of 1302 short story anthologies: those with stories from all or most of the countries grouped together, including a section of English-language anthologies; those from countries of a region; and those from individual nations. For most entries a full listing of contents is provided along with brief commentary. A second section comprises annotated bibliographies of criticism of the short story, similarly arranged with materials for Latin America as a whole as well as regionally and nationally. The volume ends with four indexes: of authors of the stories; of authors of essays, introductions, and other critical materials; of titles of the critical works; and of themes. An essential tool for scholars working on Latin American narrative, this bibliography will also serve as a practical finding aid for individual writers and stories.

Product information not available.

Author Biography:
Daniel Balderston is Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, USA. He earned his PhD from Princeton in 1981 with a dissertation on Borges and Stevenson. His works include three critical books and two reference works on Borges, a book and several edited books on sexuality studies, and studies of the Latin American short story. He has also translated books of fiction by Ricardo Piglia, Juan Carlos Onetti, Jose Bianco, Sylvia Molloy and Silvina Ocampo. Mike Gonzalez is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has written widely on issues in Latin American culture and politics, particularly on Cuba, Nicaragua and Chile, on which he has several books and artricles. A regular contributor to radio and television, he has more recently written articles and co-authored one volume on issues in teaching and learning. He has translated fiction, theatre and poetry for publication and performance.

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Literature draws together entries on all aspects of literature including authors, critics, major works, magazines, genres, schools and movements in these regions from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. With more than 200 entries written by a team of international contributors the Encyclopedia successfully covers the popular to the esoteric.
The Encyclopedia will be an invaluable reference resource for those studying Latin American and/or Caribbean literature as well as being of huge interest to those folowing Spanish or Portuguese language courses.

This vast three-volume Encyclopedia offers more than 4000 entries on all aspects of the dynamic and exciting contemporary cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean. Its coverage is unparalleled with more than 40 regions discussed and a time-span of 1920 to the present day. "Culture" is broadly defined to include food, sport, religion, television, transport, alongside architecture, dance, film, literature, music and sculpture. The international team of contributors include many who are based in Latin America and the Caribbean making this the most essential, authoritative and authentic Encyclopedia for anyone studying Latin American and Caribbean studies.
Key features include:
* over 4000 entries ranging from extensive overview entries which provide context for general issues to shorter, factual or biographical pieces
* articles followed by bibliographic references which offer a starting point for further research
* extensive cross-referencing and thematic and regional contents lists direct users to relevant articles and help map a route through the entries
* a comprehensive index provides further guidance

eBook available with sample pages: 020343532X

Argues for Ocampo's multifaceted development of ambiguity in various media and genres on the levels of language, plot and gender. The critical essays in this volume are dedicated to the works of Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) and introduce readers more fully to a figure who has long been a kind of insider's secret among intellectuals of her country. As the title suggests, the purpose of the volume is to move beyond the codification of Ocampo's use of the supernatural, an early oversimplification of her work. The essays address the quirkiness, cruelty, violence, and overtsexuality of her works, elements which have impeded a full understanding of her creative vision. Here it becomes clear that Silvina Ocampo was a co-contributor to the literary enterprise of the Sur generation, which produced Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Victoria Ocampo, and had a profound influence on writers of the younger generation, such as Alejandra Pizarnik, Sylvia Molloy, Marjorie Agosin and others. Patricia N. Klingenbergis Professor of Latin American literature at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Fernanda Zullo-Ruiz is Associate Professor of Spanish at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana.

Despite the explosion of critical writing on gender and sexuality, relatively little work has focused on Latin America. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America: An Interdisciplinary Readerfills in this gap. Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy assert that the study of sexuality in Latin America requires a break with the dominant Anglo-European model of gender. To this end, the essays in the collection focus on the uncertain and contingent nature of sexual identity.

Organized around three central themes--control and repression; the politics and culture of resistance; and sexual transgression as affirmation of marginalized identities--this intriguing collection will challenge and inform conceptions of Latin American gender and sexuality. Covering topics ranging from transvestism to the world of tango, and countries as diverse as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, this volume takes an accessible, dynamic, and interdisciplinary approach to a highly theoretical topic.

"Opens up new conceptual horizons for exploring gender and sexuality. . . . In stimulating readers to think 'outside the box' of established academic notions of sexuality and gender, Sex and Sexuality in Latin America illustrates the sometimes mind-boggling mission of iconoclastic scholarship. The well-written essays are thought-provoking analyses on the cutting edge of gender scholarship."
"--Latin American Research Review, vol. 36, no. 3, 2001"

An NYRB Classics Original
Silvina Ocampo is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the short story. Italo Calvino once said about her, "I don't know another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us." "Thus Were Their Faces" collects a wide range of Ocampo's best short fiction and novella-length stories from her whole writing life. Stories about creepy doubles, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks to a girl, a house of sugar that is the site of an eerie possession, children who lock their perverse mothers in a room and burn it, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote that the cruelty of Ocampo's stories was the result of her nobility of soul, a judgment as paradoxical as much of her own writing. For her whole life Ocampo avoided the public eye, though since her death in 1993 her reputation has only continued to grow, like a magical forest. Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world's finest.

In Jorge Luis Borges's finely wrought, fantastic stories, so filigreed with strange allusions, critics have consistently found little to relate to the external world, to history--in short, to reality. Out of Context corrects this shortsighted view and reveals the very real basis of the Argentine master's purported "irreality." By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study also gives us a new sense of Borges's place within the context of contemporary literature. Through a detailed examination of seven stories, Daniel Balderston shows how Borges's historical and political references, so often misread as part of a literary game, actually open up a much more complex reality than the one made explicit to the reader. Working in tension with the fantastic aspects of Borges' work, these precise references to realities outside the text illuminate relations between literature and history as well as the author's particular understanding of both. In Borges's perspective as it is revealed here, history emerges as an "other" only partially recoverable in narrative form. From what can be recovered, Balderston is able to clarify Borges's position on historical episodes and trends such as colonialism, the Peronist movement, "Western culture," militarism, and the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Informed by a wide reading of history, a sympathetic use of critical theory, and a deep understanding of Borges's work, this iconoclastic study provides a radical new approach to one of the most celebrated and—until now—hermetic authors of our time.