"Anyone interested in contemporary literature should find this a fascinating book. Anderson-Imbert is a forerunner or anticipator of the Boom Generation in Latin American prose, and he well deserves to be better known and to gain his rightful place among those major writers."

—Thorpe Running, Professor of Spanish, Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota

Argentinian scholar and writer Enrique Anderson-Imbert is familiar to many North American students for his La Literatura de América Latina I and II, which are widely used in college Spanish courses. But Anderson-Imbert is also a noted creative writer, whose use of "magical realism" helped pave the way for such writers as Borges, Cortázar, Sábato, and Ocampo. In this anthology, Carleton Vail and Pamela Edwards-Mondragón have chosen stories from the period 1965 to 1985 to introduce English-speaking readers to the creative work of Enrique Anderson-Imbert.

Representative stories from the collections The Cheshire Cat, The Swindler Retires, Madness Plays at Chess, Klein's Bottle, Two Women and One Julián, and The Size of the Witches illustrate Anderson-Imbert's unique style and world view. Many are "short short" stories, which Anderson-Imbert calls casos (instances). The range of subjects and points of view varies widely, challenging such "realities" as time and space, right and wrong, science and religion.

In a prologue, Anderson-Imbert tells an imaginary reader, "Each one of my stories is a closed entity, brief because it has caught a single spasm of life in a single leap of fantasy. Only a reading of all my stories will reveal my world-view." The reader asks, "And are you sure that it is worth the trouble?" Anderson-Imbert replies, "No." The unexpected, ironic ending is one of the great pleasures of reading Enrique Anderson-Imbert.