Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from Spanish by John Oliver Simon, Patrick Madden, and Steven Stewart. Edited by Antonio Ochoa. Eduardo Milan was born in 1952 in Rivera, Uruguay, a small city that shares a street with the city of Santana do Livramento in Brazil. He lost his Brazilian mother when he was only a year-and-a-half old. As a teenager his father sent him to live in the countryside, an experience that transformed the shy boy into a confident young man. During the repressive military dictatorship of the 1970s and '80s his father was arrested for his involvement in the national resistance movement known as the Tupamaros. He was given a twenty-four-year prison sentence. The name of the prison where he was sent was Libertad (Freedom). After living in fear for several years following his father's arrest, Milan went into exile in Mexico in 1979 where he still lives, in a white house with a fig tree in the garden. From the late '80s to the early '90s he wrote a column on contemporary Latin American poetry for the journal Vuelta, which was directed by Octavio Paz. In 1997 he was awarded one of the most prestigious poetry awards in Mexico, the Aguascalientes prize, for his book of poems Alegrial. This volume is the first significant selection of his work in English.

Cinderella’s sisters surgically modify their feet to win the prince’s love. A werewolf gathers up enough courage to visit a dentist. A medium trying to reach the afterworld gets a recorded message. A fox and a badger compete to out-fool each other. Whether writing of insomnia from a mosquito’s point of view or showing us what happens after the princess kisses the frog, Ana María Shua, in these fleet and incandescent stories, is nothing if not pithy—except, of course, wildly entertaining. Some as short as a sentence, these microfictions have been selected and translated from four different books. Flashes of insight, cracks of wit, twists of logic, and quirks of language: these are fictions in the distinguished Argentinean tradition of Borges and Cortázar and Denevi, as powerful as they are brief. One of Argentina’s most prolific and distinguished writers, and acclaimed worldwide, Shua displays in these microfictions the epitome of her humor, riddling logic, and mastery over our imagination. Now, for the first time in English, the fox transforms itself into a fable, and “the reader is invited to find the tail.�