The Topless Tower

When a mysterious stranger arrives laden with paintings, Leandro finds his quiet life instantly and mysteriously disrupted. Awakening locked in a windowless room in a topless tower, he finds himself trappedthe subject in one of the stranger's eerie paintings. Heavily influenced by nonsense literature such as Lewis Carroll'sAlice in Wonderlandand the surrealist movement in South America,The Topless Towerfeatures all the typical hallmarks of Silvina Ocampo's fantastical writing. With subtle inflections of language and tremendous displays of imagination running riot, Ocampo's writing is beautifully translated here by James Womack.

Silvina Ocampo was an Argentine poet and short story writer who collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges. She won first prize in the 1962 National Poetry Competition for Lo amargo por dulce. She is the author of Complete Stories, The Fury and Other Stories, Inventions of Memory, and many others.