The Impostor: and Other Stories

(Paperback, Main - Classic Edition)

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Description

Whimsical and sinister, each story by Silvina Ocampo is like a knife of spun sugar that can still pierce between your ribs. A thief breaks into the house of a psychic with disastrous results, a bride has her personality subsumed by the previous occupant of her home, and two men switch destinies for a change of pace.

The Impostor offers a comprehensive collection from one of the twentieth century's great forgotten woman writers. Here are tales of doubles and living dolls, angels and demons, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, and much else that is mad, sublime, and delicious.

With an array spanning the length of Ocampo's career, these haunting stories are among the world's strangest and best.

Reviews

'Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.' - Jorge Luis Borges

'No other writer better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us.' - Italo Calvino

'Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvellous. 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 humour.' - Alberto Manguel

Author Bio

Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) studied painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Leger in Paris, before returning to Buenos Aires. Her first collection of stories, Forgotten Journey appeared in 1937. She was also a prolific poet and translator. Ocampo was reportedly denied Argentina's National Prize for fiction in 1959 after judges decided her work was 'too cruel'.