Piano Stories

by Felisberto Hernandez, Luis Harss (Translator), Italo Calvino (Introduction), Francine Prose (Preface by)

Overview

From the writer adored by the likes of García Marquez, Calvino, and Francine Prose comes a collection of Hernández's classic tales

Piano 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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811221801
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/27/2014
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1902, Felisberto Hernández was a talented pianist, playing in the silent-screen movie theaters when he was twelve years old. He later toured the small concert halls of Uruguay and Argentina. He married four times,published seven books, and died, impoverished, in 1964.

Born in Brooklyn, Francine Prose has published fourteen novels. The Washington Post has called her work a “sheer delight.”

Editorial Reviews

"A vision of such startling beauty that it flares up like an old-fashioned phosphorous match and illuminates our whole lives."

Francine Prose

"Excellent … miraculously alive … wonderful."

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Pye

"If I hadn't read the stories of Felisberto Hernandez in 1950, I wouldn't be the writer I am today."

Gabriel García Márquez

"Poetry that transforms the ordinary into the uncanny."

Bookforum

Uruguayan fabulist Hernandez (1902-1964) influenced Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others, but the appeal of these fey tales that introduce him to an English-speaking audience and that recount the adventures of a poor pianist may elude the casual reader. For Hernandez, inanimate objects have a will and conscience of their own. About a red pencil used by his music teacher, the narrator exclaims, ``like a piglet suckling in quick, short bursts, it would cling hungrily to the white of the page, leaving little sharp footprints with its short black hoof and merrily wagging its long red tail.'' In another story, the narrator plays the piano for an agoraphobic who believes that her balcony has a soul and that, jealous over the attention she pays to the narrator, the balcony has jumped from the building. Other strange doings involve a promotional scheme for a furniture store whereby promoters inject would-be customers with a serum that sensitizes them to special advertising broadcasts, and a woman who dresses up a doll that resembles her in her own clothing and whose husband eventually falls in love with the doll. Hernandez's imagination is extremely fertile, but his prose, at least in this translation, is baggy and he tends to trot out intriguing but ultimately meaningless phrases: ``She leaned her bare arms on the panes as if she were resting them on someone's breast.'' (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly