Silvina Ocampo - As Convidadas

A mature work and one of the author's most acclaimed books, The Guests (1961) brings together, in true Ocampian style, forty-four disturbing stories on her favorite themes:

childhood, love, madness, and the fantastic, including *The Diary of Porfiria Bernal*, the haunting metamorphosis of a governess, *The Revelation*, the visions at the bedside of a dying man, and the short story that gives the collection its name.

A window open to the everyday supernatural, which looms before sentient beings in specters and apparitions, Silvina Ocampo's merciless writing, like the characters she creates, is a tribute to a rigorous imagination and a deceptive naiveté, capable of both tenderness and terror, as if wanting to "show us Heaven and then throw us into Hell."