Alberto Chimal
Bewildering Stories biography
|
Born in 1970 in Toluca, Alberto Chimal now resides in Mexico City with his wife and fellow writer Raquel Castro and a cat named Primo.
He obtained his Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is the author of the novels Los esclavos (2009) and La torre y el jardín (2012), as well as numerous short story collections, including Gente del mundo (1998), Éstos son los días (2004), Grey (2006), Los atacantes (2013), and Manos de lumber (2018).
According to Chimal, most of his works are akin to what Bruce Sterling calls slipstream fiction and deal with the fantastic in somewhat strange ways. In Verónica Murguía’s words, Chimal is a “storyteller who can’t give up, to our delight, the desire to describe what can only be created with words.” Marco Kunz considers him “one of the most versatile and unpredictable writers of current Spanish-American literature.”
Chimal’s second novel, La torre y el jardín, was a finalist for the 2013 Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallegos. Edmundo Paz Soldán opines that it “should become one of the first classics of Latin American literature of this century.”
“A Young Man’s Fortune” is a translation of “Fortuna,” which appeared in his 2001 short story collection El país de los hablistas.
Copyright © 2019 by Toshiya Kamei
