Celeste Goes Dancing, and Other Stories: An Argentine Collection

This superb collection showcases 14 talented Argentinianok with Argentine in subtitle?/ok/pk writers. An artist who has abandoned her work in Silvina Ocampo's ``The Drawing Lesson'' is brought face-to-face with her younger self: a girl with a pinafore, hair ribbon and infinite artistic promise. In ``A Memory of Punkal,'' Angel Bonomini describes an even eerier confrontation, as a man wandering the streets of a deserted city examines a pile of corpses and recognizes one--his own. A writer who despises the abasement of modern fiction agrees to judge a ``Short Story Contest'' on the theme of supermarkets; Marcos Aguinis's hilarious tale shows the hapless judge swamped with such literary jewels as ``Jesus Goes Shopping'' and ``Yoghurtssp correct/pk of Death.'' In Adolfo Bioy-Casares's ``The Windowless Room,'' a tourist killing time in Berlin follows a mysterious stranger to what the stranger maintains is the edge of the universe: an empty, nondescript room in a building that resembles an M. C. Escher drawing. Some of the stories, which were written or published in the 1980s, have previously appearedok?or appeared previously?pk in the U.S. British-based di Giovanni is a veteran translator of Jorge Luis Borges. ( June)