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by Manuel Puig (Author), Suzanne Jill Levine (Translator)
Manuel Puig's "dazzling and wholly original debut" (New York Times Book Review) is a startling anatomy of a small town in thrall to its own petty lusts, betrayals, scandals, thefts, and gossip--but most of all, to the movies.
When it appeared in 1968, Manuel Puig's debut--a portrait of the artist as a child in small-town Argentina--was hailed as revolutionary. Borrowing from the language of "true romance" and movie magazines, the techniques of American modernism, and Hollywood montage, Puig created an exuberant queer aesthetic while also celepating the secret lives of women.
Hanging on the conversations of his mother, friends, and neighbors, Puig's stand-in Toto pieces together stories as full of passion, desire, and revenge as anything dreamed up for the silver screen. "A screamingly funny book, with scenes of such utter bathos that only a student of final reels such as Puig could possibly have verbally recreated for us" (Alexander Coleman, New York Times), it is also a bittersweet love letter to the golden age of Hollywood.
Author Biography
Born in a small town in the Argentine pampas, Manuel Puig (1932-1990) read philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires before winning a scholarship to study film direction at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Exiled from Argentina, he settled in New York City in 1963. His 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman was filmed in 1985 by the Argentine-Brazilian director Héctor Babenco, thereafter becoming a Broadway musical in 1993. Puig's novels have been translated into fourteen languages.
Suzanne Jill Levine is an acclaimed translator of Latin American literature. She is the author of Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Her editions include the Penguin Paperback Classics series of Jorge Luis Borges's essays and poetry.
