Thus Were Their Faces

Selected Stories

By: Silvina Ocampo, Daniel Balderston - translator

Narrated by: Raquel Beattie, Gary Tiedemann

An NYRB Classics Original

Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer "better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us." Jorge Luis Borges flatly declared, "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature."

Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world's most individual and finest.

©2015 NYREV, Inc; Stories copyright 1937, 1948, 1959, 1961, 1970, 1987, 1988 by the Estate of Silvina Ocampo; Translation copyright 1988, 2015 by Daniel Balderston (P)2025 Tantor Media