A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams . . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's intended victim . . .



Originally published in hardcover as End of the Game and Other Stories, the fifteen stories collected here-including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name-shows Julio Cortázar's nimble capacity to explore the shadowy realm where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.

JULIO CORTÁZAR was born in Brussels to Argentinian parents in 1914, was raised in Argentina, and in 1952 moved to Paris, where he continued to live for the rest of his life. He was a poet, translator, an amateur jazz musician as well as the author of several novels and volumes of short stories. Ten of his books have been published in English: The Winners, Hopscotch (which won the National Book Award), Blow-Up and Other Stories, Cronopios and Famas, 62: A Model Kit, A Change of Light, We Love Glenda So Much, and A Certain Lucas. He received the Prix Médicis Award (France, 1974) and the Rubén Darío Order of Cultural Independence (Nicaragua, 1983), among other accolades. Considered one of the great modern Latin American authors, he died in Paris in February 1984.

ONE

Axolotl  3

House Taken Over  10 

The Idol of the Cyclades  28

Letter to a Young Lady in Paris  39 

A Yellow Flower  51



TWO

Continuity of Parks  63

The Night Face Up  66

Bestiary  77

The Gates of Heaven  97 

Blow-Up  114



THREE

End of the Game  135 

At Your Service  150 

The Pursuer  182

Secret Weapons  248