Cinderella’s sisters surgically modify their feet to win the prince’s love. A werewolf gathers up enough courage to visit a dentist. A medium trying to reach the afterworld gets a recorded message. A fox and a badger compete to out-fool each other. Whether writing of insomnia from a mosquito’s point of view or showing us what happens after the princess kisses the frog, Ana María Shua, in these fleet and incandescent stories, is nothing if not pithy—except, of course, wildly entertaining. Some as short as a sentence, these microfictions have been selected and translated from four different books. Flashes of insight, cracks of wit, twists of logic, and quirks of these are fictions in the distinguished Argentinean tradition of Borges and Cortázar and Denevi, as powerful as they are brief. One of Argentina’s most prolific and distinguished writers, and acclaimed worldwide, Shua displays in these microfictions the epitome of her humor, riddling logic, and mastery over our imagination. Now, for the first time in English, the fox transforms itself into a fable, and “the reader is invited to find the tail.”
Author
Ana María Shua has earned a prominent place in contemporary Argentine fiction with the publication of many books in nearly every genre: novels, short stories, short short stories, poetry, children's fiction, books of humor and Jewish folklore, anthologies, film scripts, journalistic articles, and essays. Her award-winning works have been translated to many languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Islandic, Bulgarian, and Serbian, and her stories appear in anthologies throughout the world. Born in Buenos Aires in 1951, Shua began her literary career at the young age of sixteen with the publication of El sol y yo (The Sun and I), a volume of poetry which received two literary prizes in 1967. She went on to study at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires and worked as an advertising copywriter and journalist during the early stages of her career. Since then, she has received numerous national and international awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel El libro de los recuerdos(The Book of Memories, 1994). Her other novels include Soy Paciente (Patient, 1980), Los amores de Laurita (Laurita's Loves,1984), which was made into a movie, La muerte como efecto secundario (Death as a Side Effect, 1997). and El peso de la tentación (The Weight of Temptation, 2007). Her first four microfiction books have been published in Madrid in one volume: Cazadores de Letras, (Letter’s Hunters, 2009). Her complete short stories have been published as Que tengas una vida interesante (Buenos Aires, 2009). Her last microfiction book is Fenómenos de circo in 2011. She published Contra el tiempo, short-stories, in 2013
