A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams . . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer’s intended victim . . .
Originally published in hardcover as End of the Game and Other Stories, the fifteen stories collected here—including “Blow-Up,” which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film of the same name—shows Julio Cortázar's nimble capacity to explore the shadowy realm where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.
"[Cortázar] is a unique storyteller. He can induce the kind of chilling unease that strikes like a sound in the night."
—Time
"Julio Cortázar is a stunning writer. It is difficult to imagine how he could improve as a writer of short stories."
—The Christian Science Monitor
"A glittering showcase for a daring talent . . . Julio Cortázar is a dazzler."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"A first-class literary imagination at work."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Cortázar displays throughout his stories the ability to elevate them above the condition of those gimmicky tales which depend for effect solely on a twist ending. His genius here lies in the knack for constructing striking, artistically 'right' subordinate circumstances out of which his fantastic and metaphysical whimsies appear normally to spring."
—Saturday Review
"He was, perhaps without trying, the Argentine who made the whole world love him."—Gabriel Gárcia Marquez
"I’m permanently indebted to the work of Cortázar." —Roberto Bolaño
"Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed." —Pablo Neruda
