Synopsis "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.

Alejandro Zambra

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Alejandro Zambra (Santiago de Chile, 1975) has published, among others, the novels Bonsai (2006), The Private Lives of Trees (2007), Ways of Going Home (2011) and Chilean Poet (2020), the short story collection My Documents (2014), the essay collections Not to Read (2018) and Free Topic (2019), and a couple of books that are quite more difficult to classify, like the very unique Facsimile, which Anagrama reissued in 2021, and Children's Literature (2023), a series of tales, fiction and non-fiction, about childhood and parenthood

His novels have been translated into twenty languages, and his stories have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s. He has been a fellow at the New York Public Library and has received, among other distinctions, the English Pen Award, the O. Henry Prize, and the Prince Claus Award.

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