Cold Tales

“I was introduced to the work of Virgilio Piñera when I read Cold Tales, his collection of absurdist, surrealist, yet viscerally realistic short stories. No one’s stories are quite like Piñera’s. If I tossed out names like Borges, Ionescu, or Kafka, you might get some sense of his work — and it’s certainly of the same caliber, worthy of being considered as among the great writers of the 20th century — but you would likely make the mistake of thinking you knew it because you’d read theirs, and Piñera absolutely deserves to be read on his own.” – Thomas Frick

“Translator Mark Schafer… has captured Piñera’s deranged formalism with considerable grace….” – Dan Bellm

“It could not have been easy to translate Piñera, but Mark Schafer’s English versions seem to catch the look and sound, the feel of this unique and demanding writer, preserving his black humor, his irony, his subtlety, and all of his intensity.” – Alan Ryan

“The translation by Mark Schafer, as one comes to expect from the translators chosen by Eridanos, is impeccable.” – Alberto Manguel