Books like Yesterday

In San Agustín de Tango, you can never be sure what’s waiting around the corner.Over the course of a single day – the day before today – the hero of this novel and his adored wife embark on a journey through the absurd and the surreal, encountering a choir of monkeys and a carnivorous ostrich, travelling from the studio of an artist obsessed with the colour green to the waistcoat pocket of a pot-bellied man.All the while, the tolling of the bell in the city square pushes their whirlwind adventure towards its fateful conclusion…A brilliant and bizarre work from an overlooked great of 20th century Chilean literature, in English translation for the first time and with a new introduction by Alejandro Zambra.Written by Juan Emar.Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.