“Silvina Ocampo’s richly textured world shimmers with childhood sweetness and sorrow. Her narrator’s hyper-observant gaze travels through the multiplying interiors of houses, mirrors, dresses, adult giants, dream figures, and nimble acrobats, in search of love stolen by bad magic. Ocampo inhabits and brings to life a hyper-real, surreal, and resolutely feminine world ruled by unapologetic beauty and pervading sadness. She is a close kin of Remedios Varo and Frida Kahlo, weavers of the magical Latin American art that bewitches us time after time. This beautiful translation fully renders that magic.”—Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time Like Now: New Poems

“This translation opens up the wonderful sepia-tinted strangeness of Ocampo’s complete first book of stories to a readership that may already know her fiction from Daniel Balderston’s anthologies, Leopoldina’s Dream (1988), and Thus Were Their Faces (2015), which presented two stories from Forgotten Journey including the title story and ‘A Strange Visit.’ Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan’s vivid translation of the whole of Forgotten Journey captures well Ocampo’s unsettlingly topsy-turvy world, peopled by precocious children who act with the self-possession of adults, and adults cowed by the fears and phobias of childhood. In their carefully crafted version, Ocampo’s idiosyncratic governesses, servants, circus performers and children act out intense dramas, influenced by the palpably malignant force of the objects surrounding them. Loss of innocence is a perpetual threat, and the translation savors this pervasive unease. With stories like ‘The Dead Horse’ and ‘The Two Houses of Olivos’ the reader can place Ocampo in relation to other key figures in Argentinian literature in translation, such as Julio Cortázar in his ‘End of the Game’, or Jorge Luis Borges and Cortázar’s fascination with doubles.”—Fiona Mackintosh, author of Childhood in the Works of Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik

“Silvina Ocampo was once called the ‘the best kept secret of Argentine letters,’ and was, through her own work and that of those she championed, a key figure of modernism. Known primarily in the English-speaking world as a friend of Borges and wife to his collaborator Bioy Casares, the translation of more of her work into English is a reason to celebrate her for her own right, as one of the most singular writers of the 20th century.”—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books, CA

“Ocampo (1903–1993) is a legend of Argentinian literature, and this collection of her short stories brings some of her most recondite and mysterious works to the English-speaking world. Many of these are glancing sense impressions, such as ‘The Enmity of Things,’ a dreamlike vision of sinister windows in a rotting, cavernous house filled with secret rooms, or ‘The Olive Green Dress,’ which briefly follows a scandalous schoolteacher. Other stories are more forthcoming, though just as strange: in ‘The Lost Passport,’ a 14-year-old girl and a streetwalker together board a doomed cruise ship, managing a kind of mystic transference before the inevitable wreckage. ‘Landscape of Trapezes’ follows the story of a tightrope walker and her monkey, while two girls, rich and poor, trade places in ‘The Two Houses of Olivos’ as their guardian angels lie sleeping in the garden; and in the title story, a child struggles to recall the moment of her own birth. Common topics for Ocampo include children’s first encounter with death and disease and the secret malevolence of certain clothing items (a cardigan provokes a feeling of misery in one character; a bathing suit reminds another character that the sea is ‘a device of endless torture’). In Ocampo’s prose, every detail indicates a hidden world just beyond waking. This collection is an ideal introduction to a beguiling body of work.”—Publishers Weekly