Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists

Elegant prose and imaginative ironies bring these compelling short stories to life in this first English-language collection from Mexican author Roberto Ransom. Each of the ten stories is filled with fascinating, yet enigmatic and sometimes elusive characters: an alligator in a bathtub, an invisible toad who appears only to a young boy, the beautiful redheaded daughter of a mushroom collector, a deceased journalist who communicates in code, and even Leonardo Da Vinci himself, meditating on The Last Supper. One of Mexico’s most original writers, Ransom explores these characters’ emotional depths as they move through their fantastical worlds that, while at times unfamiliar, offer brave and profound insights into our own.

Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists is the follow-up to Ransom’s highly acclaimed A Tale of Two Lions, praised by Ignacio Padilla as “the best Mexican literary work I have read in recent years. . . . [It] heralds a pen capable of that rarest of privileges in our letters: attaining the comic and profoundly human through a perfect simplicity.” This collection of short stories has been translated with great care by Daniel Shapiro.

Roberto Ransom is an award-winning Mexican writer whose published work includes novels and collections of short stories, poetry, and essays, as well as children’s literature.? His novel A Tale of Two Lions has also been translated into English. He is professor at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua. Daniel Shapiro is a translator of Latin American literature and the author of three collections of poetry, including Woman at the Cusp of Twilight. He is a distinguished lecturer at the City College of New York, CUNY, and the managing editor of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas.