About the book
Argentine author Julio Cortázar's fifteen stories here were drawn from three earlier collections in Spanish, Bestiario, Final del juego and Las armas secretas, and they probe the line where ordinary life meets the mysterious and perhaps even the terrible. In one, a man becomes fascinated by the axolotls in an aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and spends whole days staring into their eyes. In another, a brother and sister find their house being taken over by an unknown presence, and in a third a girl spends her summer at a country house where a tiger roams. The title story inspired Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up. Paul Blackburn made the English translation.
Writer Alina Varlanuta, creator of The Hole in Your Head, named it the book that excited her most and said reading the stories made her envious of Cortazar.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Alina Varlanuta (Creator/The Hole in Your Head)
I don’t believe in big impacts. I think that every book changed my way of seeing things one way or another. Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. There is where I found the best writing learnings. But if I were to name a book that excited me most, it would definitely be ‘Blow-up and Other Stories’ by Julio Cortazar and actually everything written by him. When I first read the short stories I was so envious of his ease of living in alternative realities, that I developed my own.
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