Beyond - Horacio Quiroga

Beyond by Horacio Quiroga, translated by Elisa Taber / small 180-page paperback, 5 x 7 inches / ISBN 9781955190374 / published by Sublunary Editions

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"My whole being, my collapse, and my agony are a white and weary anguish until death, which will overtake me soon. Moment after moment, I expect to hear beyond silence, shredded and dotted by vertiginous distance, a remote crackling." -- from "The Vampire"

As he neared the end of his troubled life, Horacio Quiroga penned a collection of stories that straddle thresholds, the ones between life and death, between sanity and madness, between man and nature. Partly set in the labyrinthine Misiones Jungle and haunted by the suicides of his stepfather, wife, and both his children, the otherworldly grace and human tenderness of these stories juxtapose a violently direct prose. Translated for the first time into English, Beyond (El más allá, 1935) brings readers tantalizingly near to the abysses that lurk just on the other side of everyday experience. Includes: "Beyond", "The Vampire", "The Flies", "The Express Train Conductor", "The Call", "The Son", "His Absence", "Beauty and the Beast", "Lady Lioness", "The Puritan", and "Sunset".

Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937) was a Uruguayan author of short stories, novels, poems, and a play. He is perhaps best remembered for his Cuentos de la selva (Jungle Tales, 1918) for children, which is still assigned in many schools. Quiroga was a master of blending the mystery and suspense of Poe with the particular strains of madness native to the jungles of South America with story collections like Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (Stories of Love, Madness, and Death, 1917) and La gallina degollada y otros cuentos (The Beheaded Hen and Other Stories, 1925). Elisa Taber writes and translates herself into an absent presence. An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country is her first book.