Ten
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
An astonishing collection of short stories by one of the most daring prose experimentalists of the 20th century
A taxidermied parrot, insulted by a stodgy uncle, comes violently alive and batters the poor fool to death with its beak. A terrible tyrant, Zar Palemón, presides over grotesque ritualized sex acts in his court—which is itself contained in a demonic gemstone the size of a fist. And deep in the Andes, in a hidden cave, an unremarkable house cat waits to trap its hapless victim with a Gorgon’s gaze and engage him in a staring contest on which the fate of the cosmos just might depend.
Such are a few of the bizarre adventures found within Juan Emar’s mind-bending collection of short stories, Ten. Allegory? Parody? Horror? Surrealism? Yes to all, and none of the above: where lesser writers mark their end-point, the unclassifiable Juan Emar jumps off, straight into the deep end. Life is far from still in Emar’s world, where statues come alive, gaseous vampires stalk, and our hopes and fears materialize in a web of shocking interconnections unified by twisted logic and crystalline prose.
Now, Ten is available in English for the first time, deftly translated by Megan McDowell and with an introduction by César Aira, who writes: “Emar has neither precedents nor equals; his echoes and affinities—Lautréamont, Macedonio Fernández, Gombrowicz—flow from his readers’ own inclinations.” Byzantine and vivid, intricate and bizarre, this quiver of shorts by Chile’s most idiosyncratic mad genius of literature will leave readers astounded for decades to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chilean writer Emar (1893–1964) stocks the surreal tales of this freewheeling collection, originally published in 1937, with magical animals and unnerving settings. "The Green Bird" recounts the adventures of a parrot, from when it's plucked out of the Amazon by a French doctor to its death and a shocking moment of violence involving its ghost. In "Damned Cat," the narrator ventures into the wilderness and has a cosmic encounter with a cat. The narrator of "The Cantera Estate" visits a farm that's been listed for sale and finds the property suffused with "a marked discontent." The narrator and two men accompanying him recite the alphabet and the solfège scale in an attempt to restore order to the property, but instead find themselves in a nightmare comprising exploding anthills and sinister ladies with parasols. The story lines zig and zag in unexpected ways and are most effective when readers allow the chaos to wash over them. This dizzying collection will appeal to fans of Kōbō Abe, Lenora Carrington, and Witold Gombrowicz.
