Two novellas and four stories, never before translated into English, by the great and too little known Uruguayan master, Felisberto Hernández.Lands of Memory presents a half-dozen wonderful works by one of the greatest yet least-known South American writers of the twentieth century. Felisberto Hernández's extraordinary stories have been always greatly prized by other writers, and the two novellas and four stories collected in Lands of Memory show why. "Lands of Memory" and "In the Times of Clemente Colling" are two dreamlike novellas, which are carried along like pieces of otherworldly music by odd rhapsodic memories. Curiously haunting, the four stories also included in Lands of Memory turn upon small improbable events―small unpredictable, off-the-wall events which turn upside-down a first recital or a salesman's calling. These works have been long overdue for translation into English, and New Directions is pleased to have them in Esther Allen's stunning versions.

Lands of Memory

Allen, Esther

HERNÁNDEZ, Felisberto

Reference

New Directions

A superb fiction collection by the great Uruguayan writer: "If I hadn't read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn't be the writer I am today." ―Gabriel García Márquez
Lands of Memory presents a half-dozen wonderful works by Felisberto Hernández, "a writer like no other," Italo Calvino declared, "like no European or Latin American. He is an 'irregular,' who eludes all classifications and labellings―yet he is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books."
Named a Guardian Best Book of the Year by Alfred Brendel and a TLS Best Book of the Year by Michael Hofmann (who calls Felisberto "a loopier, vegetarian Kafka, inhabiting his mazy personal baroque"), Lands of Memory collects four astonishing stories and the two dreamlike novellas "Around the Time of Clemente Colling" and "Lands of Memory."

Lands of Memory (New Directions Paperbook)

Literature & Fiction

United States

Bound together in mystical crocodile skin, two unforgettably singular novellas
Two Crocodiles highlights two literary masters from opposite ends of the world ― Russia’s Fyodor Dostoevsky and Uruguay’s Felisberto Hernández. Dostoevsky’s crocodile, cruelly displayed in a traveling sideshow, gobbles whole a pretentious high-ranking civil servant. But the functionary survives unscathed and seizes his new unique platform to expound to the fascinated public. Dostoevsky’s Crocodile is a matchless, hilarious satire.
Hernández’s Crocodile, on the other hand, while also terribly funny, is a heartbreaker. A pianist struggling to make ends meet as a salesman finds success when he begins to weep before clients and audience alike, but then he can’t stop the crocodile tears.

Two Crocodiles (New Directions Pearls)

DOSTOEVSKY, FYODOR

Literary

From the writer adored by the likes of García Marquez, Calvino, and Francine Prose comes a collection of Hernández's classic talesPiano Stories presents fifteen wonderful works by the great Uruguayan author Felisberto Hernández, “a writer like no other,” as Italo Calvino declares in his introduction: “like no European or Latin American. He is an ‘irregular,’ who eludes all classifications and labellings ― yet he is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” Piano Stories contains classic tales such as “The Daisy Dolls,” “The Usher,” and “The Flooded House.”

Piano Stories

stories, Uruguay, tr L Harss, afterword Cortazar

Piano Stories (The Eridanos Library)

Contemporary

Marsilio Pub

Piano stories (Eridanos library)

Marsilio Publishers

L'avvelenata e altri racconti (MiniMix) (Italian Edition)

Independently published

Acclaimed by the initiated, Felisberto Hernandez has long been considered «a writer's writer, more admired by his colleagues than known by the public at large» (Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Yale University). As with his predecessors in the «genre of the strange» Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, the apparent eccentricities in Felisberto Hernandez's stories create a coherent system of allusions and correspondences, a system that reaches its summit in masterpieces such as «Las Hortensias» and «La casa inundada». As Hoffmann, who preceded him, and Cortazar, who followed, Felisberto turned away from the literary trends of his times and departed on his own journey, undertaking the task of redefining the human being and replacing the accepted notion of material reality with what he called «the mystery»: small and deep daily realities that fall outside an ever narrowing focus on the homogenous and utilitarian. A trained musician and composer, Felisberto elaborated his literary compositions as musical structures, based on the relations among notes and phrases. Thus, Felisberto Hernandez's short stories cannot be approached and read as isolated pieces if the reader intends to grasp the complexity lying deep below the surface. In this edition Ana Maria Hernandez -who bears the same name as Felisbertos' second daughter and teaches Advanced Spanish Composition at CUNY- analyzes the gradual development of Felisberto's theory and praxis of composition by commenting on his most representative short stories and emphasizing the intertextuality of the recurring symbols and themes throughout his literary production.  This approach transforms this edition in an exceptional basis for Creative Writing and Advanced Spanish Composition courses, exposing students to texts that exerted a noticeable influence upon acclaimed writers such as Julio Cortazar -his biggest fan- Juan Carlos Onetti, and Italo Calvino, and provoked one of the biggest critical blunders by the otherwise sharp critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal.

Las Hortensias y Otros Cuentos (Spanish Edition)

Hernaandez, Felisberto

Stockcero

Relatos para piano

Genre Fiction

Todos los cuentos del escritor uruguayo que deslumbró a Cortázar, Onetti, García Márquez e Italo Calvino. Un autor magistral cuyos relatos aúnan con gran originalidad lo cotidiano con lo extraordinario. Los relatos de Felisberto Hernández, en su esfera de rarezas y a veces en el borde de lo fantástico, abordan la realidad de una manera tan inaudita como certera, para devolvérnosla de tal forma que nos hace pensar que lo que los demás llamábamos así es una construcción arbitraria que tan solo presentíamos, pero que no acertábamos a nombrar. La suya es una literatura del recuerdo, de la memoria como ficción y como espejo de la verdad al mismo tiempo, con una marca autobiográfica de fronteras difusas que a la vez es superada por una imaginación desbordante. Felisberto Hernández es, por estos motivos, entre muchos otros, una de las figuras decisivas de la literatura uruguaya y, también, de la narrativa en lengua española del siglo XX. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION  All the stories by the Uruguayan author who dazzled Cortázar, Onetti, García Márquez, and Italo Calvino. A masterful author whose tales cleverly unite the everyday with the extraordinary.    The tales of Felisberto Hernández, in their realm of eccentricities and sometimes bordering on fantasy, take on reality in such an unprecedented yet accurate way that it makes us think that what the rest of us called “reality” before was an arbitrary construction that we merely sensed, but that we didn’t name properly. His is a literature of memory, of memoir as fiction but also as a mirror of the truth, with an autobiographical style of vague boundaries and boundless imagination. Felisberto Hernández is therefore one of the decisive figures in Uruguayan literature and also in 20th-century Spanish-language literature. With a prologue by the Spanish writer Ray Loriga.  

Narrativa reunida / Collected Stories (Spanish Edition)

Dramas & Plays

Alfaguara

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