Strange as It Seems

A horse growing out of a flowerpot. A man unbound by gravity holding his wife in mid-air, their “weight balanced.” Another horse, this time rotting on the front lawn of a ranch. These are just a few of the mesmerizing images that Tomás Downey includes in Diving Board, the first collection of his enigmatic, nerve-racking, and profound short stories to appear in English.

Writing firmly in the tradition of fellow Argentines Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Downey blends fantasy into everyday life. He focuses on the eerie and disquieting, the distorted and refracted, the revelations that come in whispers, and the transformations that emerge in the shadows. He does so with a cinematic eye — his origins are as a screenwriter — and an inquisitive and unflinching mind. Some of his contemporaries, like Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez, have been widely translated in recent years. One hopes that Diving Board paves the way for the Buenos Aires...