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 world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector."-Mariana Enriquez, LitHub Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love. "Both her debut story collection, Forgotten Journey, and her only novel, The Promise, are strikingly 20th-century texts, written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction."-Lily Meyer, NPR "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature."--Jorge Luis Borges "I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us."-Italo Calvino "These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. . . . there has never been another voice like hers."-John Freeman, Executive Editor, LitHub " . . . it is for the precise and terrible beauty of her sentences that this book should be read.A masterpiece of midcentury modernist literature triumphantly translated into our times."-Publishers Weekly * Starred Review "Ocampo is beyond great-she is necessary."-Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance and Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University "Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it."-Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread "Ocampo is a legend of Argentinian literature, and this collection of her short stories brings some of her most recondite and mysterious works to the English-speaking world. . . . This collection is an ideal introduction to a beguiling body of work."-Publishers Weekly This collection of 28 short stories, first published in 1937 and now in English translation for the first time, introduced readers to one of Argentina's most original and iconic authors. With this, her fiction debut, poet Silvina Ocampo initiated a personal, idiosyncratic exploration of the politics of memory, a theme to which she would return again and again over the course of her unconventional life and productive career. Praise for Forgotten Journey: "Ocampo is one of those rare writers who seems to write fiction almost offhandedly, but to still somehow do more in four or five pages than most writers do in twenty. Before you know it, the seemingly mundane has bared its surreal teeth and has you cornered."-Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories "The Southern Cone queen of the short-story, Ocampo displays all her mastery in Forgotten Journey. After finishing the book, you only want more."-Gabriela Aleman, author of Poso Wells "Silvina Ocampo's fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borges's. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. It's thrilling to have work of this magnitude finally translated into English, head spinning and thrilling."-Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe

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.

Kirkus Reviews calls The Promise one of the Best Books of Fiction, and of Literature in Translation, of the year! * Voted one of the Big Fall Books from Indies by Publishers Weekly & LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 "The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector."—Mariana Enriquez, LitHub "Both her debut story collection, Forgotten Journey, and her only novel, The Promise, are strikingly 20th-century texts, written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction."—Lily Meyer, NPR "Silvina Ocampo is the next writer you should be reading."—Michael Silverblatt A dying woman's attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity. "Of all the words that could define her, the most accurate is, I think, ingenious."—Jorge Luis Borges "I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us."—Italo Calvino "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 in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor."—Alberto Manguel "Art is the cure for death. A seminal work by an underread master. Required for all students of the human condition."—Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews "This haunting and vital final work from Ocampo, her only novel, is about a woman's life flashing before her eyes when she's stranded in the ocean. . . . the book’s true power is its depiction of the strength of the mind and the necessity of storytelling, which for the narrator is literally staving off death. Ocampo’s portrait of one woman’s interior life is forceful and full of hope."—Gabe Habash, Starred Review, Publishers Weekly "Ocampo is beyond great—she is necessary."—Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance "I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us."—Italo Calvino "These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. . . . there has never been another voice like hers."—John Freeman, Executive Editor, LitHub "Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it."—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread A woman traveling on a transatlantic ship has fallen overboard. Adrift at sea, she makes a promise to Saint Rita, "arbiter of the impossible," that if she survives, she will write her life story. As she drifts, she wonders what she might include in the story of her life—a repertoire of miracles, threats, and people parade tumultuously through her mind. Little by little, her imagination begins to commandeer her memories, escaping the strictures of realism. Translated into English for the very first time, The Promise showcases Silvina Ocampo at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive. Ocampo worked quietly to perfect this novella over the course of twenty-five years, nearly up until the time of her death in 1993.

Silvina Ocampo (1903-93), author of seven volumes of poetry and more than three hundred short stories, was a member of Argentina's Sur generation, the extraordinary group of writers who initiated Latin America's literary boom. Like her most distinguished contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo is known for her interest in the supernatural. In contrast to Borges, however, her characters are frequently women or little girls who challenge notions of female propriety at every turn. Ocampo's stories often portray a world of every-day banality in which violence, sexual transgression, and hints of the supernatural combine to question the reader's expectations of female power, freedom and creativity. The selections in this volume trace the female characters of Ocampo's stories from the entirety of her literary production. They are arranged in chronological order so that the evolution of her style is visible. One can perceive, for instance, that her early interest in surrealism returns later in her life. The uncanny sense that there is something going on beneath the surface of her narratives is a characteristic of all of them. Silvina Ocampo has for too long been a kind of insider secret for the literati of her generation. She deserves to be more widely understood as a significant contributor to the innovations of her circle, that of Borges, Bioy Casares, Jose Bianco and Julio Cortazar. She also deserves to take her place among the more famous Latin American women writers of her day, Maria Luisa Bombal (Chile), Armonia Somers (Uruguay), Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro (Mexico) and Clarice Lispector (Brazil). She is clearly one of the twentieth century's most original voices.