Yesterday

Juan Emar is the pen name of Chilean writer and artist Álvaro Yáñez 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 año, Miltín 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.

'The legacy left behind by this literary forerunner [...] is a vivid world marked by unreality which is forever inseparable from the enduring world we live in.' - Pablo Neruda; 'For his extraordinary genius [...] he should have been recognised as the greatest Chilean novelist of his century.' - Jose Miguel Ibanez; 'Emar's writing incorporates popular forms, elements of rhetoric, and literary allusions in carefully wrought language reminiscent of Borges at its most brilliant moments.' - Luis Inigo Madrigal, Letra Sobre Letras.