The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories - Hardcover

Quiroga, Horacio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292775148 ISBN 13: 9780292775145

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1976

Synopsis

Tales of horror, madness, and death, tales of fantasy and morality: these are the works of South American master storyteller Horacio Quiroga. Author of some 200 pieces of fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and Jack London, Quiroga experienced a life that surpassed in morbidity and horror many of the inventions of his fevered mind. As a young man, he suffered his father's accidental death and the suicide of his beloved stepfather. As a teenager, he shot and accidentally killed one of his closest friends. Seemingly cursed in love, he lost his first wife to suicide by poison. In the end, Quiroga himself downed cyanide to end his own life when he learned he was suffering from an incurable cancer.

In life Quiroga was obsessed with death, a legacy of the violence he had experienced. His stories are infused with death, too, but they span a wide range of short fiction genres: jungle tale, Gothic horror story, morality tale, psychological study. Many of his stories are set in the steaming jungle of the Misiones district of northern Argentina, where he spent much of his life, but his tales possess a universality that elevates them far above the work of a regional writer.

The first representative collection of his work in English, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories provides a valuable overview of the scope of Quiroga's fiction and the versatility and skill that have made him a classic Latin American writer.

About this title

From the Publisher

The Americas, Ilan Stavans, Series Editor, Irene Vilar, Associate Editor

1976 Paperback, University of Texas Press

With an introduction by Jean Franco

From the Back Cover

"Quiroga's stories are, like Poe's, full of psychological shocks and eerie effects, and are bracingly, if ruthlessly, realistic."--New Yorker

"As an author of the macabre and of nature, Quiroga redefined the borders of the fantastic, realizing that pure realism was an abomination of the marvelous and horrific reality of the Latin American jungle."--Review: Latin American Literature and Arts

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0292775148
• ISBN 13: 9780292775145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214