Las hortensias y otros cuentos

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», Hoffmann, Gogol, Poe, and Kafka, the eccentricities in Felisberto Hernandez¿s stories create a coherent system of allusions and correspondences that reaches its summit in masterpieces as «Las Hortensias» and «La casa inundada». As his predecessor, Hoffmann, and his follower, Cortazar, Felisberto turned away from the literary trends of his times to redefine the human being and recreate material reality so as to include «the mystery»: small and deep realities outside the utilitarian frame. A trained musician and composer, Felisberto elaborated his literary compositions as musical structures, based on the relations among notes and phrases. Thus the complexities below the surface cannot be grasped by reading them as isolated pieces. In this edition Ana Maria Hernandez ¿who teaches Advanced Spanish Composition at CUNY¿ analyzes the gradual development of Felisberto's poetic theory and praxis by commenting on his most representative short stories and emphasizing the intertextuality of the recurring symbols and themes throughout his production. This edition is 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 Rodriguez Monegal.