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Published Nov 2018
144 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
The first collection in English of an endlessly surprising, master storyteller.
Like those of Kafka or Poe, Amparo Dávila's stories are masterful, terrifying, and mesmerizing - you'll finish reading each story gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, loneliness, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, she makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some form of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest, her debut collection in English, you'll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.
"Filled with nightmarish imagery and creeping dread, Dávila's stories plunge into the nature of fear: Terrifying." - Publishers Weekly
"Brief, macabre stories that twist our obsessions with animals and our own thoughts. Like Poe for the new millennium." - Kirkus
"Like a dream, Dávila's fictional realm is filled with signs and symbols, with hybrid creatures who appear to defy the laws of nature, and with characters who do not act according to logic or reason...Her writing is intentionally opaque and allows readers to draw a number of different interpretations; it is this intriguing, elusive quality that has perhaps led to her enduring popularity in Mexico." - The Paris Review
"The work of Amparo Dávila is unique in Mexican literature. There is no one like her, no one with that introspection and complexity." - Elena Poniatowska
"Extraordinary." - Julio Cortázar
This information about The Houseguest was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amparo Dávila was born in Mexico in 1928. She has published numerous collections of short stories and for a time worked as Alfonso Reyes's secretary. In recent years a massive resurgence of interest has acknowledged her as one of Mexico's finest masters of the short story. She was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 1977 and honored with the Medalla Bellas Artes in 2015.
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