Juan Emar 
Yesterday 

For the first time in English, a mind-bending, surreal masterpiece by “the forerunner of them all” (Pablo Neruda)

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 Mc Dowell. Emar’s work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.

A propos de l’auteur

Alejandro Zambra is the author of Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees, Ways of Going Home, Not to Read, My Documents and Multiple Choice, among other books. Zambra is the recipient of a New York Public Library Cullman Center fellowship, and his stories and essays have appeared in publications like The New Yorker,  The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review,  Granta, The Believer and Harper’s. His latest novel is called Chilean Poet and has just been published by Viking. He lives in Mexico City.