Yesterday

In the city of San Agustín de Tango, the banal is hard to tell from the bizarre. In a single day, a man is guillotined for preaching the intellectual pleasures of sex; an ostrich in a zoo, reversing roles, devours a lion; and a man, while urinating, goes bungee jumping through time itself--and manages to escape. Or does he? Witness the weird machinery of Yesterday, where the Chilean master Juan Emar deploys irony, digression, and giddy repetitions to ratchet up narrative tension again and again and again, in this thrilling whirlwind of the ecstatically unexpected--all wed to the happiest marriage of any novel, ever.

Born in Chile at the tail end of the nineteenth century, Juan Emar was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and lived in self-imposed exile from the literary circles of his day. A cult of Emarians, however, always persisted, and after several rediscoveries in the Spanish-speaking world, he is finally getting his international due with the English-language debut of Yesterday, deftly translated by Megan McDowell. Emar's work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.

Author: Juan Emar
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 04/05/2022
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780811231572


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/21/2022

About the Author
Emar, Juan: - Juan Emar is the pen name of Chilean writer, painter, and art critic Álvaro Yánez Bianchi. Born in Chile in 1893, he was a strong advocate of the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, and his critical writings helped revolutionize the art scene in his country. Under-appreciated in his time, he is now considered to be one of the most important 20th-century Latin American writers.McDowell, Megan: - Megan McDowell lives in Santiago, Chile. She has translated many of the most important contemporary Spanish language authors, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, and Lina Meruane. She has been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize, and was the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Zambra, Alejandro: - Alejandro Zambra is the author of Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees, Ways of Going Home, Not to Read, My Documents and Multiple Choice, among other books. Zambra is the recipient of a New York Public Library Cullman Center fellowship, and his stories and essays have appeared in publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, The Believer and Harper's. His latest novel is called Chilean Poet and has just been published by Viking. He lives in Mexico City.