Ten: Stories

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.

CONTENTS
Four Animals
1. The Green Bird
2. The Damned Cat
3. The Trained Cat
4. The Unicorn
Three Women
5. Papusa
6. Chuchezuma
7. Lasette
Two Places
8. The Hotel Mac Quice
9. The Cantera Estate
One Vice
10. The Vice of Alcohol
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► Emar's stories expand and surprise, so, even when one is alert to his penchant for trickery, their focus and direction remain unpredictable... It is this strangeness and lack of inhibition that makes his prose so captivating. We are lucky to finally have the short stories of this remarkable storyteller and thinker available in English. ◄ Colm McKenna, Times Literary Supplement

► Originally published in 1937, this collection by Emar (1893-1964) arrived at the height of the Modernist movement; his eeriness and fluid, satirical approach to storytelling put him in league with better-known European and North American contemporaries. Indeed, his work seemed to anticipate the elliptical style that would make Borges world famous... Offbeat yarns from a sui generis author. ◄ Kirkus Reviews

► Emar has no precents, and no equals. ◄ César Aira

► Weird and charming. ◄ Hanson O'Haver, The Nation

► The wonder of Emar's universe doesn't derive from the numerological matrix of his structure, or even the secret code he used to criticize the literary conservatism of his day, but in his imagination, which explodes like the big bang and overflows, giving rise to all possibilities. ◄ Roberto Wong, Letras Libres

► Juan Emar, ahead of his time, was no doubt writing for readers of the future, and it's as arrogant as it is exciting to suppose that those readers of the future are us. ◄ Alejandro Zambra

► Juan Emar, the Chilean writer who bears a marked resemblance to the monument to the unknown soldier. ◄ Roberto Bolaño

► The forerunner of them all. ◄ Pablo Neruda
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Introduction by César Aira
Design (and cover?) by Erik Carter
New Directions Paperbook #1604