Description
In the city of San Agustín de Tango, the banal is hard to tell from the bizarre. In a single day, a man is guillotined for preaching the intellectual pleasures of sex; an ostrich in a zoo, reversing roles, devours a lion; and a man, while urinating, goes bungee jumping through time itself--and manages to escape. Or does he? Witness the weird machinery of
Yesterday, where the Chilean master Juan Emar deploys irony, digression, and giddy repetitions to ratchet up narrative tension again and again and again, in this thrilling whirlwind of the ecstatically unexpected--all wed to the happiest marriage of any novel, ever.
Born in Chile at the tail end of the nineteenth century, Juan Emar was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and lived in self-imposed exile from the literary circles of his day. A cult of Emarians, however, always persisted, and after several rediscoveries in the Spanish-speaking world, he is finally getting his international due with the English-language debut of Yesterday, deftly translated by Megan McDowell. Emar's work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.
About the Author
Juan Emar is the pen name of Chilean writer, painter, and art critic Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi. Born in Chile in 1893, he was a strong advocate of the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, and his critical writings helped revolutionize the art scene in his country. Under-appreciated in his time, he is now considered to be one of the most important 20th-century Latin American writers.
Megan McDowell has won the English PEN award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, and a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; she also has been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize. She won the 2022 National Book Award in translation alongside Samanta Schweblin for Seven Empty Houses.
Alejandro Zambra is the author of the novels Chilean Poet, Multiple Choice, Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai; the short story collection, My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; and Not to Read, a collection of essays. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, as well as a Cullman Center fellowship, his stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, The White Review and Harper's, among others. He lives in Mexico City.
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