Bøger af Augusto Monterroso

The lone novel by a Latin American author of very short fiction (praised as "the most beautiful stories in the world" by Italo Calvino)--an antic, metafictional send-up of the Mexican literary scene told through the unreliable recollections of an aging critic's friends, relatives, and attendants. The one and only novel by renowned Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso--Latin America's most expansive miniaturist, whose tiny, acid, and bracingly surreal narratives Italo Calvino dubbed "the most beautiful stories in the world"--The Rest Is Silence presents the reader with the kaleidoscopic portrait of a provincial Mexican literary critic, one Eduardo Torres: a sort of Don Quixote of the Sunday supplements, whose colossal misreadings are matched only by the scale of his vanity. Presented in the form of a festschrift for the aging writer, this rollicking metafiction offers up a bouquet of highly unreliable reminiscences by Torres's friends, relations, and servants (their accounts of their subject skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savant's own comically botched attempts at "criticism." Monterroso's narrative is a ludicrous dissection of literary self-conceit, a (Groucho) Marxian skewering of the Mexican literary landscape, and perhaps a wry self-portrait by an author profoundly sensible of just how high the stakes of the art of criticism really are--and, consequently, of just how far it has to fall.

The Dinosaur is Still Here, the complete work of Augusto Monterroso, brings together for the first time in a single volume all the stories of the master of the micro-story, each one more brilliant, arranged chronologically: those collected in his first Complete Works (and Other Stories) (1959), in The Black Sheep and Other Fables (1962), Perpetual Motion (1972), The Rest is Silence (1978), Journey to the Center of the Fable (1981), The Magic Word (1983); The Letter E. Fragments of a Diary (1986), The Gold Diggers (1993), The Cow (1998), Birds of Latin America (2001), and Literature and Life (2003). A key book that recovers and vindicates the value of one of the best Spanish-speaking writers that the 20th century has given us. "His books must be read hands down: his danger is based on underhanded wisdom and the deadly beauty of lack of seriousness." Gabriel Garcia Marquez

These translations of short stories reveal Monterroso as a foundational author of the new Latin American narrative.