“The beautiful, horrible world of Mariana Enriquez, as glimpsed in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, with its disturbed adolescents, ghosts, decaying ghouls, the sad and angry homeless of modern Argentina, is the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE...

From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories. The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness, alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface-subterranean, furious and impotent,...

In the tradition of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor, Schweblin's stories move on the boundary between the real and the fantastic. This selection, chosen by the author, is an indispensable piece of contemporary Argentine literature. Schweblin's stories have the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark take on huge implications; they leave your pulse racing and the line between the real and the strange blurring.

Stories deal with an unusual garden, an enormous library, authorship, language, memory, philosophy, and the art of writing.

"A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger: these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Labatut's book thrusts the...

A novella and eleven short stories, representing early and recent work by the acclaimed Columbian author, provides further proof of his imaginative and technical exuberance and mastery.

"I tell you, God could care less about the poor. Tell me, why must we live here like this? What have we done to deserve this? You're so good and yet you suffer so much," a young boy tells his mother in Tomás Rivera's classic novel about the migrant worker experience. Outside the chicken coop that is their home, his father wails in pain from the unbearable cramps brought on by sunstroke after working in the hot fields. The young boy can't understand...

"A traffic jam outside Paris lasts for weeks. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro meet on a mountaintop during the Cuban Revolution. A flight attendant becomes obsessed with a small Greek island, resulting in a surreal encounter with death. In All Fires the Fire, Julio Cortázar (author of Hopscotch and the short story "Blow-Up") creates his own mindscapes beyond space and time, where lives intersect for brief moments and situations break and refract. All...

Sixteen contemporary stories by Cuban women. One describes life in Cuba without Soviet aid, a second is on a father-son relationship, and in a third, a housewife and a career woman imagine each other's lives.