Duplications and Other Stories
By Panamanian writer Enrique Jaramillo LeviTranslated by Leland H. Chambers
ISBN: 0-935480-65-X
Price: $16.00
Pages: 192
This imaginative and fantastic collection of short stories repeatedly asks, "What if...?", leading readers to explore situations that depart from our normal expectations of daily life. In Duplications and Other Stories storefront mannequins come alive and make love at night. A witness to a street stabbing becomes a victim of the very crime he has just observed.. A woman hopelessly neglected by her husband resolves her despair by an unexpected transformation.
Drawn to the strangeness of life, Enrique Jaramillo Levi is at home in the rebellious regions of consciousness. His fiction challenges us to contemplate the side of human existence that we fear; the one that entertains and engages the inexplicable and the illogical.
"Panamanian publisher, scholar, and editor Jaramillo
cleverly blends the absurd and the fantastic into quotidian
situations.... [His] bold, quick strokes suggest the
narrative finesse of Julio Cortázar's End of the Game....
[R]eaders may open the volume at random and be enchanted....
A recommended relative newcomer to the growing Latin
American short fiction family."
--Library Journal
"Levi's latest collection... challenge[s] the darker
corners of the human imagination.... The stories' urban
squalor and moody perspective add to a dark view of human
interactions... but they revel in the power of the human
imagination to describe those interactions in outlandishly
original ways."
--Publishers Weekly