Forgotten Journey, Paperback/Silvina Ocampo

Description Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love. "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 "Silvina Ocampo's prose is made of elegant pleasures and delicate terrors. Her stories take place in a liquid, viscous reality, where innocence quietly bleeds into cruelty, and the mundane seeps, unnoticed, into the bizarre. Revered by some of the masters of fantastic literature, such as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, 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 Forgotten Journey takes its title from the story of a girl who struggles to recall the events of her birth in order to remember her identity. Another story follows a friendship between two girls, one poor and one wealthy, who grow up to appear identical to one another, enabling them to trade lives and families. In "The Enmity of Things," a young man begins to suspect that his mundane possessions are conspiring against him. When he flees to his rural childhood home, the silent countryside proves only more sinister and mysterious. 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: "Readers will delight in this whimsical and fantastical collection of short stories by Silvina Ocampo. Through these fantastical tales the narrator explores the life of young girls, their friendships, their inner solitudes, as well as the constant quest to understand the duality of life and the imagination." --Marjorie Agosin, author of I Lived On Butterfly Hill "Ocampo inhabits and brings to life a hyper-real, surreal, and resolutely feminine world ruled by unapologetic beauty and pervading sadness." -- Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time Like Now: New Poems "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 "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. Very little seems to happen and you are quickly lulled to relax, which makes the way these stories creep up behind you even more surprising. 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 About the Author Silvina Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1903. A central figure of Argentine literary circles, Ocampo's accolades include Argentina's National Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was an early publisher of Argentina's Sur magazine, where she worked closely with its founder, her sister; Adolfo Bioy Casares, her husband; and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1937, Sur published Ocampo's first book, Viaje olvidado . She went on to publish thirteen volumes of fiction and poetry during a long and much-lauded career. Ocampo died in Buenos Aires in 1993. La promesa , her only novel, was posthumously published in 2011. Carmen Boullosa (born in Mexico City in 1954) is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. She has published fifteen novels, the most recent of which are El complot de los románticos , Las paredes hablan , and La virgen y el violin , all with Editorial Siruela in Madrid. Her second novel, Antes, won the renowned Xavier