"We are made of stories, and, when they are as well-told as Silvina Ocampo's, they will remain after we are gone."-Dorothy Potter Snyder, Reading in Translation
" . . . a bold phantasmagoria, marked by Ocampo's insight that in extremis, delirium can be the highest form of truth."—Laura Kolbe, New York Review of Books
"Diamonds, Dionysus, and Drowning: . . . every sentence glints with precision . . . what you’re after are the sentences, which have the feel of epigrams . . . I think I took a photo of nearly every other page so as not to forget them."—Rhian Sasseen, The Paris Review
"Suzanne Jill Levine, working with Jessica Powell on The Promise and Katie Lateef-Jan on Forgotten Journey, has produced a translation that beautifully captures the elegance and strangeness of Ocampo’s style. . . . The results are intoxicating."—Miranda France, The Times Literary Supplement
"These are the moments that elevate The Promise into a higher echelon of letters; simultaneously, death proves evasive and nostalgia serves as a survival tactic. All the while readers get to witness the wondrous tightrope act Ocampo performs, traipsing back and forth between past and present."—John Gibbs, Zyzzyva
"Legend Silvina Ocampo worked on perfecting this novel [The Promise] over the course of 25 years, right up until her death in 1993, and it’s out this fall in its first ever English translation. It’s being published alongside Forgotten Journey a collection of short stories by Ocampo translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan. In The Promise, a woman reminisces about her life, and lets her imagination get away with her, after falling overboard into the sea—a reflection of Ocampo’s own struggles with dementia and her interest in memory and identity. It’s said to be Ocampo 'at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive' and I just can’t wait to get my hands on it and Forgotten Journey."—Pierce Alquist, Book Riot
"A woman examines her life piecemeal, putting it together like a puzzle missing half its pieces--but the resulting image is all the more mesmerizing because of it. A deft and subtle novel that holds together as airily as a spider's web."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories
"It’s an extraordinary book, for which only Borges’s description of her writing will do—clairvoyant."—Brian Dillon, 4Columns
"Her obliquely-focused narrative lens requires readers to experience the off-kilter sensation of a slant perspective, lending a cinematic quality to her gothic themes."—Dorothy Potter Snyder, "Reading in Translation"
"Silvina Ocampo’s fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borges’s. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. It’s thrilling to have work of this magnitude finally translated into English, head spinning and thrilling."—Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe
"Forgotten Journey and The Promise by late Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo are cornucopias, outpourings of words with the same concision we ascribe to nature. Descriptions pour forth not like water but sap, ensuring the reader will pause and savor, not just in a portrait but every paragraph, each word."—Ana Castillo, Women's Review of Books
"A masterpiece from an
