Look Out For… Blow Up & Other Stories by Julio Cortazar

“Full of tales that you’ll want to read again and again to appreciate their nuances and strangeness.”

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 victim… In the fifteen stories collected here – including ‘Blow-Up,’ which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film of the same name – Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.

Why we’re excited about this book: A welcome reissue for this collection of stories from the Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar. There’s a lot of strangeness between these pages, with elements of the traditional uncanny story mixing with a more Latin American magical-realism. Cortazar is very much a one-off and even attempting to summarise what some of these stories are ‘about’ gives some indication as to now unique he is:

A man believes his mind changes places with an axolotl he has become obsessed with in a local zoo.

A woman vomits up live rabbits.

A man reads a murder mystery story where he is the victim.

And in possibly the most well-known story for European readers, ‘House Taken Over’, a brother and sister who live in an old ancestral home are forced to reside in fewer and fewer of its rooms, as each one is taken over by ‘them’ – unseen presences – the reader is never quite sure if they’re physical, ghostly or purely psychological.

Full of tales you’ll want to read again and again to appreciate their nuances and strangeness, Blow Up & Other Stories deserves space on the shelf of every discerning genre fan.

This book will appeal to: fans of the weirdness of Borges, the strangeness of Aickman and the uneasiness of Poe.

Blow Up is out 5 August 2014 from Pantheon.

Look Out For… The Making of George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead by Lee Karr

“The full story of the making of the film is told for the first time in this lavish book!”

Released in 1985, Day of the Dead was the final film of George A. Romero’s classic zombie trilogy, which forever changed the face of horror filmmaking. Now, for the first time, the full history of the making of this cult favourite is revealed. Drawing on a wealth of exclusive interviews with the cast and crew, author Lee Karr leaves no stone unturned – detailing the movie’s pre-production, shoot, release and legacy. Filled with behind-the-scenes gossip and previously unpublished stories from the set, as well as over 100 full-colour photos, this book gives Day of the Dead the resurrection it deserves.

Why we’re excited about this book: The final film in George A. Romero’s original zombie trilogy had a torturous making, involving cuts to the budget, hasty rewrites, and crew members having to sleep inside a coal mine because they couldn’t afford the travel back to civilisation. Romero’s original vision of “the Gone With The Wind of zombie films” was compromised and the film itself was misunderstood when the original released.

The full story of the making of the film is told for the first time in this lavish book by Lee Karr (who has previously written about the other Dead films) full of exclusive interviews and colour photographs. Whilst the film itself might not be considered the best of the three by all fans, the fact that the filming was so torturous makes for a compelling behind the scenes story.

This book will appeal to: people who want fuel for those late night convention arguments about which of Romero’s films really is the best…

The Making of George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead is out 31 July 2014 from Plexus.

JAMES EVERINGTON