Yesterday

In San Agustín de Tango, you can never be sure what's waiting around the corner.

Over the course of a single day – the day before today – the hero of this novel and his adored wife embark on a journey through the absurd and the surreal, encountering a choir of monkeys and a carnivorous ostrich, travelling from the studio of an artist obsessed with the colour green to the waistcoat pocket of a pot-bellied man.

All the while, the tolling of the bell in the city square pushes their whirlwind adventure towards its fateful conclusion…

A brilliant and bizarre work from an overlooked great of 20th century Chilean literature, in English translation for the first time and with a new introduction by Alejandro Zambra.



Juan Emar is the pen name of Chilean writer and artist Alvaro Yanez Bianchi (1893-1964), taken from the French for 'I'm fed up'. A strong advocate of the literary avant-garde, he was linked with surrealist groups in Santiago and Paris. He published four books between 1935 and 1937 - Un ano, Miltin 1934, Ayer and Diez - with little critical success. His works were reissued in the 1970s and he is now considered to be one of the most significant South American writers of the twentieth century. Yesterday is his first novel to be published in English.