'Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature' —Jorge Luis Borges
Whimsical and sinister, each story by Silvina Ocampo is like a knife of spun sugar that can still pierce between your ribs. A thief breaks into the house of a psychic with disastrous results, a bride has her personality subsumed by the previous occupant of her home, and two men switch destinies for a change of pace.
The Impostor offers a comprehensive collection from one of the twentieth century's great forgotten woman writers. Here are tales of doubles and living dolls, angels and demons, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, and much else that is mad, sublime, and delicious.
With an array spanning the length of Ocampo's career, these haunting stories are among the world's strangest and best.
She lived a little in the shadow of her sister Victoria on the one hand and of her husband Bioy Casares and Borges on the other. She was an extravagant woman when writing her stories, short and crystalline, she was perfect.
—Cesar Aira
Ocampo wrote with fascinated horror of Argentinean petty bourgeois society, whose banality and kitsch settings she used in a masterly way to depict strange, surreal atmospheres sometimes verging on the supernatural.
—The Independent
Ocampo mixes unembellished narration and dark, fantastic elements into a heady cocktail.
—Heather Cleary, Lit Hub
Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvelous. Other than Silvina Ocampo, I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time or in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor.
—Alberto Manguel
Silvina Ocampo is, together with Borges and Garcia Marquez, the leading writer in Spanish.
—Jorge Amado
