Forgotten Journey

“Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvelous. Other than Silvina Ocampo, I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor.”––Alberto Manguel, author of Packing My Library

“Silvina Ocampo’s fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borges’s. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. It’s thrilling to have work of this magnitude finally translated into English, head-spinning and thrilling.”—Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe

“The Southern Cone queen of the short story, Ocampo displays all her mastery in Forgotten Journey. After finishing the book, you only want more.”—Gabriela Alemán, author of Poso Wells

“There is literature that takes the known world (a dinner party or a walk with a dog, first love or a visit to friends) and shows it in a way we’ve never seen before; there is literature that takes us to a place we’ve never been (early twentieth-century Buenos Aires or adrift in the middle of the ocean) and makes it somehow familiar. The marvel of Silvina Ocampo’s fiction is that it does both things simultaneously, its deepest context the confluence of the things of this world (‘a heavy wool dress embroidered with flowers, the sleeves poorly attached,’ ‘a big box full of nails, newspaper clippings and old pieces of wire,’ ‘vanity tables without legs . . . old pharmaceutical flasks . . . chess pieces, chandeliers, miniatures’) and the ineffable mystery of mortality (‘I close the windows, shut my eyes and see blue, green, red, yellow, purple, white, white. White foam, blue. Death will be like this, when it drags me from the little room of my hands.’)”—Kathryn Davis, author of The Silk Road

“Ocampo is one of those rare writers who seems to write fiction almost offhandedly, but to still somehow do more in four or five pages than most writers do in twenty. Very little seems to happen and you are quickly lulled to relax, which makes the way these stories creep up behind you even more surprising. Before you know it, the seemingly mundane has bared its surreal teeth and has you cornered.”—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories

“Readers will delight in this whimsical and fantastical collection of short stories by Silvina Ocampo. Forgotten Journey, her first published collection now in English, is superbly translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan. Through these fantastical tales the narrator explores the life of young girls, their friendships, their inner solitudes, as well as the constant quest to understand the duality of life and the imagination. These stories transport you to a place that perhaps you have known in dreams. Now you can enter them through the lucid and fantastical world and words of Silvina Ocampo.”—Marjorie Agosín, author of I Lived On Butterfly Hill