In late-20th-century Peruvian letters, Edgardo Rivera Martínez was a household name. A crucial protagonist in the development of the contemporary short story in Latin American literature, his fiction often stages fantastical encounters that belie his characters’ harsh economic and political realities.

Spanning the sixty-plus years Rivera Martínez wrote short fiction, this collection begins with uncertainty and a long walk through the mountains in “Azurite.” Rivera Martínez’s most celebrated short story, “Angel of Ocongate,” follows, in which a strangely attired figure wanders Andean peaks and high plains in ambiguous exile. From these mountain stories, we travel to Lima, a place of Andean migration, struggle, and discrimination. Here, we find a migrant artist in “The Welder”; a child who makes a feline friend in “The Story of Cifar and Camilo”; and something extraordinary in old downtown Lima in “A Flower in Buena Muerte Square.” “Amaru,” a story that is also a poem, and Rivera Martínez’s earliest story, “The Unicorn,” juxtapose Andean and European myth.

In what is perhaps Rivera Martínez’s most clearly political story, “Marayrasu,” we meet eleven-year-old Alfonso, an orphan figure seeking work in an Andean mine. He becomes involved with the local union’s fight for worker rights—all while feeling the powerful pull of a large mountain overlooking the mining village. Negotiating between reality and dreams, Andean divinities and foreign corporations, Alfonso probes for belonging in an environment that is at once hostile and tender.

With this English translation of twelve representative stories, Edgardo Rivera Martínez’s literary universe finally opens to an anglophone audience.