In one of the best stories in The Houseguest and Other Stories, “Musique Concrète,” a woman believes she’s being stalked by her husband’s lover. Dreams come true-especially nightmares-and obsessions turn into reality.
Her characters inhabit a fluid world that pushes boundaries: between animals and humans, reality and fantasy, fear and obsession.
In The Paris Review last year, Matthew Gleeson, one of the collection’s translators (along with Audrey Harris), noted “an instability of borders” in Dávila’s stories. Her work (first published in Mexico in 1950) is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allen Poe, and tests the limits of fiction. New Directions Publishing | November 17, 2018Īmparo Dávila’s first collection to appear in English, The Houseguest and Other Stories, includes the kinds of stories you feel in the chest and gut-if you ever had childhood nightmares after watching The Twilight Zone (think “The Hitchhiker” or William Shatner’s monstrous visions on the airplane), you know what I’m talking about.
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