Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"These stories are feverish, cruel, and wry, set among the surrealisms of puberty, disability, and precarity." Joshua Cohen, Harper's
Review
“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 or in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor.” Alberto Manguel
Review
“Dark, masterly tales...a (very good) introduction...a (very good) translator...Ocampo’s technique is beyond all reproach; an author has to keep masterly control when letting events veer off beyond the quotidian (the phrase 'magic realism' seems inadequate when applied to her).” Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
About the Author
Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was a poet, fiction writer, translator, and playwright. Born into an elite Buenos Aires family, she studied art in Paris under Fernand Léger and surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico before marrying the Buenos Aires author Adolfo Bioy Casares. Ocampo published several volumes of short stories and poetry, as well as collaborative anthologies with Bioy Casares and close friend Jorge Luis Borges. NYRB Poets will be publishing a collection of Ocampo’s poetry in the fall of 2014.
Helen Oyeyemi is a British author. She has written four novels, including White is for Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, and most recently Boy, Snow, Bird.
Daniel Balderston is the Mellon Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the editor of Variaciones Borges, and a scholar of Borges, Southern Cone literature, Brazilian literature, and Latin American gender and sexuality studies.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, poet, and essayist. His fiction, which drew on his interest in mathematics and detective stories, made him one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. English-language anthologies of his stories include Ficciones, The Aleph, and Labyrinths.