Enrique Anderson-Imbert
Argentinian scholar and writer Enrique Anderson-Imbert is familiar to many North American students for his La Literatura de América Latina I and II, which are widely used in college Spanish courses. But Anderson-Imbert is also a noted creative writer, whose use of 'magical realism' helped pave the way for such writers as Borges, Cortázar, Sábato, and Ocampo. In this anthology, Carleton Vail and Pamela Edwards-Mondragón have chosen stories from the period 1965 to 1985 to introduce English-speaking readers to the creative work of Enrique Anderson-Imbert. Representative stories from the collections The Cheshire Cat, The Swindler Retires, Madness Plays at Chess, Klein’s Bottle, Two Women and One Julián, and The Size of the Witches illustrate Anderson-Imbert’s unique style and world view. Many are 'short short' stories, which Anderson-Imbert calls casos (instances). The range of subjects and points of view varies widely, challenging such 'realities' as time and space, right and wrong, science and religion. In a prologue, Anderson-Imbert tells an imaginary reader, 'Each one of my stories is a closed entity, brief because it has caught a single spasm of life in a single leap of fantasy. Only a reading of all my stories will reveal my world-view.' The reader asks, 'And are you sure that it is worth the trouble?' Anderson-Imbert replies, 'No.' The unexpected, ironic ending is one of the great pleasures of reading Enrique Anderson-Imbert.
