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First published in English in 1972 and long out of print, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar's brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called "City." As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, "seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!" It is the setting where the usual restraints of traditional novelistic order are discarded and the reader is taken on a daring and exciting new experience of life itself, The New York Times described 62: A Model Kit as "deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious." Library Journal said 62: A Model Kit is "a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time."

A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams... A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's intended victim...

Originally published in hardcover as End of the Game and Other Stories, the fifteen stories collected here--including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name--shows Julio Cortázar's nimble capacity to explore the shadowy realm where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.

"The Instruction Manual," the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. "Unusual Occupations," the second chapter, describes the obsessions and predilections of the narrator's family, including the lodging of a tiger-just one tiger- "for the sole purpose of seeing the mechanism at work in all its complexity." Finally, the "Cronopios and Famas" section delightfully characterizes, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, "those enemies of pomposity, academic rigor mortis and cardboard celebrity-a band of literary Marx Brothers." As the Saturday Review remarked: "Each page of Cronopios and Famas sparkles with vivid satire that goes to the heart of human character and, in the best pieces, to the essence of the human condition."

The late Julio Cortázar was a sickly child and spent many hours in bed. Perhaps those memories inspired "Cefalea," the feverish story of the care and feeding of fantastical creatures called the mancuspias, which debuted in his 1951 collection Bestiario. Tor.com is proud to share with you "Headache," the first ever English translation of "Cefalea."

The rights to translate "Headache" English were arranged by Ann VanderMeer. Translation by Michael Cisco.

The story can be found in the anthology Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Two (2015), edited by Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.