Cinderella’s sisters surgically modify their feet to win the prince’s love. A werewolf gathers up enough courage to visit a dentist. A medium trying to reach the afterworld gets a recorded message. A fox and a badger compete to out-fool each other. Whether writing of insomnia from a mosquito’s point of view or showing us what happens after the princess kisses the frog, Ana María Shua, in these fleet and incandescent stories, is nothing if not pithy—except, of course, wildly entertaining. Some as short as a sentence, these microfictions have been selected and translated from four different books. Flashes of insight, cracks of wit, twists of logic, and quirks of language: these are fictions in the distinguished Argentinean tradition of Borges and Cortázar and Denevi, as powerful as they are brief.

 

One of Argentina’s most prolific and distinguished writers, and acclaimed worldwide, Shua displays in these microfictions the epitome of her humor, riddling logic, and mastery over our imagination. Now, for the first time in English, the fox transforms itself into a fable, and “the reader is invited to find the tail.”

Ana María Shua has published more than forty books in many genres, including poetry, children’s fiction, novels, and books on Jewish folklore, and her work has been translated into many languages. She lives in Buenos Aires.

Steven J. Stewart is an associate professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University–Idaho in Rexburg. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship for Translation by the National Endowment for the Arts. His translation of Devoured by the Moon: Selected Poems of Rafael Perez Estrada was a finalist for the PEN USA Translation Award.

"Argentinean poet Shua is a master of the bon mot. Each of these concise, lyrical pieces—somewhere between aphorism, anecdote and poem, and rarely longer than a paragraph—contains a fluid, perplexing, and (often) highly amusing thought. . . . These dreamlike landscapes will delight and charm readers new to Shua’s work."—Publishers Weekly

"This is a very enjoyable collection, and the best pieces impress mightily; certainly one is left hungry for more of these morsels. Well worthwhile."—M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review

“The microfictions of Ana María Shua unfurl an absurd and ingenious world like that of Lewis Carroll. . . . What great literature breathes in these pages!”—A B C (Madrid)

“Argentinean Ana María Shua is one of the best creators of the microstory genre. An ingenious and absurd world in which pulsates the best literature.”—El País (Madrid)

“Shua’s microfictions are paradigms of wicked humor. The author shows herself capable repeatedly of zeroing in on a detail—perverse, quirky, often appalling—of the unstable reality of human experience and revealing it to be the essence of ordinary daily existence.”—David William Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women & Gender Studies at Arizona State University, and editor of Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana

“For their mental sharpness, imaginative insightfulness, and critical irony, the microfictions of Ana María Shua place her on the front line of the new Latin American fiction.”—José Miguel Oviedo

Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.