A Dream Come True: The Collected Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti - Tapa blanda

"In his quest to explore modern forms of being, Onetti also broke new formal ground. His books are complex ... reality itself devolves into a game of telephone ... [Onetti] writes violent, direct tales filled with intrigue and doom in the best manner of Conrad (the writer he most resembles) and even Faulkner (his great hero)." -- The New York Times

"(Onetti's) works, like traditional mystery stories, are structured around a chain of clues, but the deductive method the detective uses to expose the criminal and motive here attempts to penetrate the characters' inner torments, which collapse endlessly, one into the other, like a series of trap doors ... by 1940, with 'A Dream Come True, ' (Onetti) had written a masterpiece." -- Washington Examiner

"Onetti himself seems influenced by Poe by way of Baudelaire--but then filtered through William Burroughs, or perhaps B. Traven. The inhabitants of his imagined Santa María, a port city much like his native Montevideo, are a strange bunch, many of them German and Italian immigrants who are nowhere at home ... Onetti's stories are enigmatic and elegant ... All are strange--and mesmerizing. A welcome, overdue collection by a writer well deserving of his place in the Latin American canon." -- Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"In this standout collection, the Uruguayan Onetti, who died in 1994, masterly depicts the seedy disillusionment of characters in a South American backwater . . . There is a hint of Conrad in these misty tales that plunge beyond 'bare facts' and conjure up a world suffused with misanthropy and meditative irony. Readers will be bewitched." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Time and circumstance, and the particular bend of prevailing literary history, have all but buried Onetti's fiction in English. And if left unaccounted for, his work-to his readers in translation anyway-is perhaps in danger of being worn away. Onetti himself once admitted that his reign was not of this world; at the time, he hadn't intended that to be a warning." -- Jonathan Blitzer, The Nation

"Onetti had the strange quality of being inimitable and at the same time creating an entire school of writing. All of his descendants, myself included, received from him a lesson on narrative intelligence, on wise construction, on an immense love to literary imagination, on risk and irony." - Carlos Fuentes

"Onetti is the first modern writer in our language...His world is a dark one, highly pessimistic, with a vision of the human condition that is profoundly desperate, and which we would reject if it didn't reach us with such a wonderful language...I can assure you that, without the great books that I've read, among which I can count Onetti's books, my life would have been infinitely poorer." - Mario Vargas Llosa

"Onetti is an epiphany, a celebration of beauty, of emotion and tenderness." - Antonio Muñóz Molina

"Onetti's writing is so good, a mere sentence by him will give you goosebumps. If I had to sell my soul to the devil in order to write a sentence in Spanish like someone else, I would think about very few authors: Borges, Onetti." - Carlos Gamerro

"Onetti's writing knew that literature is creation, that creation is reality and not repetition or recreation, that it is about finding a good story to tell and then tell it beautifully." - Carlos Liscano

A Dream Come True collects the complete stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, presenting his existentialist, complex, and ironic style over the course of his writing career. Onetti was praised by Latin America's greatest authors, and regarded as an inventor of a new form and school of writing.

Juan Carlos Onetti's A Dream Come True depicts a sharp, coherent, literary voice, encompassing Onetti's early stages of writing and his later texts. They span from a few pages in "Avenida de Mayo - Diagonal - Avenida de Mayo" to short novellas, like the celebrated detective story "The Face of Disgrace" and "Death and the Girl," an existential masterpiece that explores the complexity of violence and murder in the mythical town of Santa María. His stories create a world of writing which is both universal and highly local, mediating between philosophical characters and the quotidian melodrama of Uruguayan villages.