Silvina Ocampo Livres

An NYRB Classics Original Thus Were Their Faces 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.” Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world’s most individual and finest.

Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love.

When a mysterious stranger arrives laden with paintings, Leandro finds his quiet life instantly and mysteriously disrupted. Awakening locked in a windowless room in a topless tower, he finds himself trapped—the subject in one of the stranger’s eerie paintings. Heavily influenced by nonsense literature such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the surrealist movement in South America, The Topless Tower features all the typical hallmarks of Silvina Ocampo’s fantastical writing. With subtle inflections of language and tremendous displays of imagination running riot, Ocampo’s writing is beautifully translated here by James Womack.

A dying woman's attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity.

Fantastical, unnerving short stories from a Surrealist master of the form.

In ihrem einzigartigen Kriminalroman untersuchen Adolfo Bioy Casares und Silvina Ocampo die Frage, ob man einen vermeintlichen Mörder lieben kann. In einem abgelegenen Hotel an der argentinischen Küste entfaltet sich ein spannendes Spiel mit Misstrauen und Verdacht, während ein Mord und ein Sandsturm die Atmosphäre des Zweifels verstärken.

In seaside Bosque del Mar, Argentina, guests at the Hotel Central are struck by a double misfortune: the mysterious death of one of their party and an investigation headed by pedant, physician, writer and insufferable busybody Dr Humberto Huberman.The translator, Mary, is found dead on the first night of Huberman's stay. Huberman quickly appoints himself leader of an inquiry that will see blame apportioned in turn to each and every guest, culminating in a wild, wind-blown reconnaissance mission nearby shipwreck, the Joseph K.