Published during the debates around the role of the author in response to the Cuban Revolution, at the height of the Latin American literary Boom, Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966) emerges not only as a culmination of Julio Cortázar’s short fiction but also as a volume in dialogue with the literary, social, and political concerns of the time. Constant throughout this collection is the representation of characters who are displaced from familiar surroundings either physically, psychologically, or even fantastically. Characters are forced to share an uncomfortable space in “Autopista del Sur,” a story situated on the highway south of Paris that presents an allegory of human relations. Through the textual transposition of Che Guevara’s diaristic rendition of his trajectory through the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba, “Reunión” also records the historical meeting of revolutionaries. Meanings produced through displacements develop also in the closing story of the volume, “El otro cielo,” in which Paris and Buenos Aires are seamlessly intertwined in the character’s experience. Displacement functions as an organizing thread through Todos los fuegos el fuego; transfers and reverberations in the stories generate disquieting tensions that reflect contemporary sociopolitical realities and the human condition.

The year 1963 is special for Julio Cortázar: he publishes Rayuela (Hopscotch) and visits revolutionary Cuba. The year before one of his stories was adapted into a film (La cifra impar [Odd Number]) and, as Ángel Rama points out in his essay “El boom en perspectiva” (included in the volume Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado) the sales of his books start to increase steadily: 10,500 in 1964, 49,000 en 1967, almost 80,000 in 1969. The Rayuela phenomenon is but one in a myriad transformations that were taking place in the cultural and literary fields: the end of the chasm that had separated mass audiences from Argentinean literature, the Latin-Americanization of the intellectual and artistic fields, the transformation of the publishing industry with the rise of Editorial Sudamericana, among others (in 1962 Eudeba’s edition of Martín Fierro had become a bestseller). Starting with Rayuela and other works published those years (such as Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo, which shared the Kennedy prize with Cortázar’s novel), this chapter questions the relationship between fiction and politics in a very troubled period of Latin American history.

Nowhere are asymmetrical power dynamics between humans and animals more evident than in systems of captivity. This chapter assesses literary responses to animal capture, with particular emphasis on zoos. It considers the colonial networks of trade that help to populate Western zoos and examines questions of spectatorship and subjectivity behind and in front of the cage. The discussion is structured around a series of vignettes staging different attitudes toward captive animals. These focus on Rainer Maria Rilke’s panther, Franz Kafka’s ape Red Peter, Julio Cortázar’s axolotl, Marie NDiaye’s fish-woman, and Lydia Millet’s benighted zoogoer, paying special attention to texts inspired by the Jardin des Plantes in Paris – the world’s oldest civil zoo, which opened during the French revolution.

While Julio Cortázar is best known as a fiction writer, a full understanding of his oeuvre must take into account his poetry, which has mostly been ignored in the critical literature. Cortázar not only published several volumes of poetry but also included poems in many of his prose works and wrote extensively about poetry. The significance of poetry – that he read as well as wrote – is ever present in Cortázar’s overall literary vision. His poetic work registers his innovative and playful sensibility along with his increasingly politicized engagement. This essay demonstrates through close readings and archival documentation how poetry for Cortázar serves as a transitional mode. Archives of his manuscripts, drafts, unpublished poems, and personal library reveal much about the author’s poetic craft and his shifting stance on the politics of his time. A thorough articulation of Cortázar’s poetic concerns provides a fuller appreciation of the formal and linguistic innovation that undergirds his prose, shapes his ideological and aesthetic evolution, and particularly informs the last phase of his life and work. Poetry serves Cortázar as a bridge between aesthetics and the world around him as his work increasingly puts innovation to the service of sociopolitical engagement.

While Julio Cortázar is best known as a fiction writer, a full understanding of his oeuvre must take into account his poetry, which has mostly been ignored in the critical literature. Cortázar not only published several volumes of poetry but also included poems in many of his prose works and wrote extensively about poetry. The significance of poetry – that he read as well as wrote – is ever present in Cortázar’s overall literary vision. His poetic work registers his innovative and playful sensibility along with his increasingly politicized engagement. This essay demonstrates through close readings and archival documentation how poetry for Cortázar serves as a transitional mode. Archives of his manuscripts, drafts, unpublished poems, and personal library reveal much about the author’s poetic craft and his shifting stance on the politics of his time. A thorough articulation of Cortázar’s poetic concerns provides a fuller appreciation of the formal and linguistic innovation that undergirds his prose, shapes his ideological and aesthetic evolution, and particularly informs the last phase of his life and work. Poetry serves Cortázar as a bridge between aesthetics and the world around him as his work increasingly puts innovation to the service of sociopolitical engagement.

The Epilogue weaves together disparate strands of resistant, worldly thinking under the aegis of Latin America. The scholar Taymiya Zaman uses Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges to decolonize the writing of history. The novelist Karan Mahajan references Bolaño to demand that American readers to approach his version of India on its own terms. And two writers – the despondent Tanuj Solanki and the hopeful Mohsin Hamid – invoke the countershelf at the end of the world.