BOOK / WAKEFIELD. Nathaniel Hawthorne

Short Story / Illustrated

Jorge Luis Borges believed that Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories inaugurated the particular mode of dreaming from which Herman Melville's oceanic language, Edgar Allan Poe's nightmares, and William Faulkner's hallucinations would emerge. In fact, when six Argentine writers were asked to name their favorite stories, Borges unhesitatingly chose Hawthorne's "Wakefield," a "brief and ominous parable" that foreshadows Kafka's world, an author who, in turn, "modifies and refines the reading of 'Wakefield.'"

Alongside "Wakefield," this volume includes two stories set in Hawthorne's ancestral New England: "Young Goodman Brown," considered by some the finest witchcraft tale written in English, and "The Minister's Black Veil," a gloomy staging of Puritan obsessions about faith and sin. "The Birthmark," with its elements of science fiction and gothic literature, adds a poignant reflection that combines criticism of scientific optimism with a demystifying view of marriage, a theme that runs through these four stories translated especially for this book.

Hawthorne's stories belong to the highest realm of art: an art subject to a genius of sublime order. Edgar Allan Poe. Unlike his friend Melville, who ventured into the seas, Hawthorne was often trapped within the contours of anxiety. The explorations he would undertake were the dangerous platforms of the human psyche. Simon Schama

Title: WAKEFIELD
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Size: 24x17 cm.
Binding: Hardcover
Genre: Short Story
Weight: 310 grams
Language: Spanish
Publisher: Hueders
Year: 1835
Pages: 234