Leopoldina's Dream

Translated by Daniel Balderston.

Silvina Ocampo writes in a style that has been recongnized by Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino as one of the finest in the Spanish language. Her stories written with a deceptive simplicity, are among the most disturbing and fascinating a reader can hope to encounter. Many are about the uneasy conjunction of opposites; of evil and saintliness, love and hate, the difficult world of childhood and the dangerously simple world of adults. Borges, who is providing a preface to this collection, has written that the cruelty of her stories is no doubt the result of her nobility of soul, a judgment no less paradoxical than her own writing.