Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories [Paperback]

An NYRB Classics Original

Thus Were Their Facesoffers 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.

These stories are feverish, cruel, and wry, set among the surrealisms of puberty, disability, and precarity. —Joshua Cohen,Harper's

“She lived a little in the shadow of her sister Victoria on the one hand and of her husband Bioy Casares and Borges on the other. She was an extravagant woman when writing her stories, short and crystalline, she was perfect.” —César Aira

“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

“Ocampo wrote with fascinated horror of Argentinean petty bourgeois society, whose banality and kitsch settings she used in a masterly way to depict strange, surreal atmospheres sometimes verging on the supernatulóå