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FROM THE PUBLISHER - THE PLACES: The east coast of Africa, a cemetery across from Venice's Fondamente Nuove, the Paris Metro, a Nicaraguan island, a Transylvanian cafe in 'a not excessively interesting German city'. THE PEOPLE: A woman experiencing the horror of her young nephew's nightmares and the unnamable violence they portend, a middle-aged writer investigating the biography of a dead laureate and stumbling onto the truth about his 'dark lady', an operative waiting for death in the crowd at a title fight promoted by Alain Delon, a Chilean hitchhiker humming American jazz on an autobahn in Austria. THE EVENTS: A deadly erotic game is played out in the dark with a seemingly complaint pickup, a man smokes and stands guard over his family through a long summer night protecting them from a real or symbolic menace in the garden, drinking cronies gather at the bedside of a dying friend to watch with impersonal curiosity his terminal phases. THE BOOK: This, Julio Cortazar's first collection in English in seven years, displays the extraordinary scope of his imagination and his accomplishment. In these eighteen stories, he segues from hard-edged political drama to worlds that are not just fantasy but evocations of an alternative reality that takes over too powerfully, and finally usurps the present. In story after story, he projects everyday dreams, fears, desires, and the terrible power they can exert. To read this collection is to tread the perilous path between the ordinary and the unimaginable, the quotidian and the surreal; to give oneself over to the disturbing vision of complete worlds created, animated, and populated with the unmistakable mastery that is the hallmark of Julio Cortazar. CONTENTS: Summer; In The Name Of Bobby; Liliana Weeping; A Place Named Kindberg; Second Time Around; Severo's Phases; Butterball's Night; Trade Winds; Manuscript Found In A Pocket; Apocalypse At Solentiname; Footsteps In The Footprints; Encounter With1n A Red Circle; The Faces Of The Medal; Someone Walking Around; The Ferry, Or Another; Trip To Venice; There But Where, How; A Change Of Light; Throat Of A Black Kitten.  The following stories were originally published in Spanish in Octaedro, by Alianza Editorial, Madrid. Edicion Castellana, Alianza Editorial, S,A., 1974: 'Summer,' 'Liliana Weeping,' 'Severo's Phases,' 'Manuscript Found in a Pocket,' 'Footsteps in the Footprints,' 'There but Where, How,' and 'Throat of a Black Kitten.' All other stories were originally published in Spanish in Alguien que anda par ahi, by Ediciones Alfaguera, Spain. (c) by Ediciones Alfaguera, S,A., 1978.

Julio Cortázar (August 26, 1914 - February 12, 1984) was a Belgian-born Argentine intellectual and author of experimental novels and short stories. He was married three times, to Aurora Bernárdez, Ugné Karvelis and Carol Dunlop. Most of his work was written in Paris, France from 1951 until his demise. Hopscotch is Julio’s magnum opus. Julio Cortázar was born to Argentine parents on August 26, 1914, in Brussels, Belgium, where his father was involved in a commercial venture as part of Argentina’s diplomatic presence. Many years later, Cortázar would say ‘my birth was a product of tourism and diplomacy.’ Because the Cortázar family were nationals of a neutral country not involved in World War I, they were able to pass through Switzerland and later reach Barcelona, where they lived for a year and a half. Cortázar regularly played at the Park Güell and its colourful ceramics would remain vivid in his memory for many years. When Cortázar was four years old, his family returned to Argentina. He spent the rest of his childhood in Banfield, near Buenos Aires, together with his mother and his only sister, who was one year his junior. During his childhood, Cortázar’s father abandoned the family; Cortázar would never see him again. In Banfield Cortázar lived in a house with a yard out back from which he obtained inspiration for future stories. His time in Banfield, however, was not happy; he would later describe it, in a letter to Graciela M. de Solá (December 4, 1963) as ‘full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness.’ Cortázar was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading. His mother selected the books for him to read, introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. He was to say later, in the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, 5/1975) ‘I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elfs, with a sense of space and time that was different to everybody else’s.’ Although he never completed his studies at the University of Buenos Aires where he studied Philosophy and Languages, he taught in several provincial secondary schools. In 1938 he published a volume of sonnets under the pseudonym Julio Denis. He would later disparage this volume. In 1944, he became professor of French literature at the National University of Cuyo. In 1949, he published a play, Los Reyes (The Kings), based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In 1951, in opposition to the government of Juan Domingo Perón, Cortázar emigrated to France, where he lived and worked until his demise. From 1952, he worked for UNESCO as a translator. His translation projects included Spanish renderings of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Alfred Jarry and Comte de Lautréamont were other decisive influences. Julio Cortázar wrote most of his major works in Paris. In later years he underwent a political transformation, becoming actively engaged with human rights causes in Latin America and openly supporting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He died reportedly of leukemia in Paris in 1984 and was interred there in the Cimetière de Montparnasse with Carol Dunlop. Some people have stated that he died from AIDS contracted via a blood transfusion; sources close to Cortázar have denied this. He did suffer from melomania. Julio Cortázar is highly regarded as a master of short story narrations. Collections like Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956) and Las armas secretas (1959) contain many of the best examples of surrealist writing in postmodern literature. Selections from those volumes were published in 1967 in English translations by Paul Blackburn under the title Blow-Up and Other Stories in deference to the English title of Michelangelo Antonioni’s celebrated film noir of 1966 (Blowup) inspired by Julio Cortázar’s story Las Babas del Diablo. Cortázar also influenced Jean-Luc Godard to write Week End with La Autopista del Sur. One of his most notable short fictions is El Perseguidor (The Pursuer), based on the life of jazz musician Charlie Parker. He also published several novels, including Los Premios (The Winners - 1960), Hopscotch (Rayuela -1963), 62: A Model Kit (62 Modelo para Armar - 1968) and Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel - 1973). They were later translated by Gregory Rabassa. Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece, Hopscotch, has been praised by other Latin American writers including José Lezama Lima, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. The novel has an open-ended structure that invites the reader to choose between a linear and a non-linear mode of reading. Cortázar’s employment of interior monologue and stream of consciousness is reminiscent of modernists like James Joyce, but his main influences were Surrealism, the French Nouveau roman and the improvisatory aesthetic of jazz. He also published poetry, drama and various works of non-fiction. One of his last works was a collaboration with his third wife, Carol Dunlop, entitled The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute; it related, partly in mock-heroic style, the couple’s extended expedition along the autoroute from Paris to Marseille in a Volkswagen camper nicknamed Fafner.

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