In time for his centenary: two groundbreaking works from a major figure of world literature, one of the founders of the Latin American Boom. With these two books--the "counter-novel" Hopscotch and the short-story collection Blow-Up--Cortazar earned a place among the most innovative authors of the twentieth century. Hopscotch follows the adventures of an Argentinean writer living in Paris with his lover and a circle of bohemian friends, and consists of 155 short chapters that the author advises us to read out of order. Blow-Up brings together the finest and most famous of Cortazar's short fiction--stories where invisible beasts stalk children in their homes, where a man reading a mystery finds out that he is the murderer's intended victim. In Cortazar's work, laws of nature, physics, and narrative all fall away, leaving us with an astonishing new view of the world.

With an introduction by Ilan Stavans.