Tales of horror, madness, and death, tales of fantasy and morality: these are the works of South American master storyteller Horacio Quiroga. Author of some 200 pieces of fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and Jack London, Quiroga experienced a life that surpassed in morbidity and horror many of the inventions of his fevered mind. As a young man, he suffered his father's accidental death and the suicide of his beloved stepfather. As a teenager, he shot and accidentally killed one of his closest friends. Seemingly cursed in love, he lost his first wife to suicide by poison. In the end, Quiroga himself downed cyanide to end his own life when he learned he was suffering from an incurable cancer.
In life Quiroga was obsessed with death, a legacy of the violence he had experienced. His stories are infused with death, too, but they span a wide range of short fiction genres: jungle tale, Gothic horror story, morality tale, psychological study. Many of his stories are set in the steaming jungle of the Misiones district of northern Argentina, where he spent much of his life, but his tales possess a universality that elevates them far above the work of a regional writer.
The first representative collection of his work in English, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories provides a valuable overview of the scope of Quiroga's fiction and the versatility and skill that have made him a classic Latin American writer.
Tales of risk and danger, suffering, disease, horror, and death. Tales, also, of courage and dignity, hard work, and human endurance in the face of hostile nature and the frequent brutality of men. And tales flavored with piquant touches of humor and bemused irony.
These are the stories of the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, here presented in an important compilation of thirteen of his most compelling tales, sensitively selected and translated by J. David Danielson. Author of some two hundred pieces of fiction, often compared to the works of Kipling, Jack London, and Edgar Allan Poe, Quiroga set many of his stories in the territory of Misiones in northeastern Argentina, the subtropical jungle region where he spent much of his life.
Included here are stories from Los desterrados (1926) often said to be his best book, as well as others from Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (1917), Anaconda (1921), and El Desierto (1924). The publication of this selection marks the first appearance in English of all but two of the thirteen stories.
Quiroga here presents a wide range of characters: parents and children, servant girls and prostitutes, landowners and lumber barons, foremen and laborers, natives and immigrants, in stories pervaded by a vision of life that is elemental, incisive, and essentially tragic. The Exiles and Other Stories shows the versatility and skill that have made him a classic Spanish American writer. It complements and illumines The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, selected and translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, also published by the University of Texas Press.
First published in 1885, The Purple Land was the first novel of William Henry Hudson, author of Green Mansions. The Anglo-Argentine naturalist distinguished himself both as one of the finest craftsmen of prose in English literature and as a thinker on ecological matters far ahead of his time.
The Purple Land is the exuberant, often wryly comic, first-person account of a young Englishman’s imprudent adventures, set against a background of political strife in nineteenth-century Uruguay. Eloping with an Argentine girl, young Richard Lamb makes an implacable enemy of his teenage bride’s father. Leaving her behind, he goes ignorantly forth into the interior of the country to seek his fortune and is eventually imprisoned and persecuted by the vengeful father. His narrative closes as he sets off on still another impetuous quest.
This facsimile of the 1904 Three Sirens Press edition includes striking woodcuts by Keith Henderson illustrating the characters in the novel and the fauna of Uruguay. Ilan Stavans’s introduction offers an opportunity to revisit The Purple Land as a "road novel" in which an outsider offers reflections on nationality and diasporic identity.
Contributors. Hugo Achugar, Alvarro Barros-Lémez, Lisa Block de Behar, Amanda Berenguer, Hiber Conteris, José Pedro Díaz, Eduardo Galeano, Edy Kaufman, Leo Masliah, Carina Perelli, Teresa Porzecanski, Juan Rial, Mauricio Rosencof, Jorge Ruffinelli, Saúl Sosonowski, Martin Weinstein, Ruben Yáñez
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press