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This superb collection showcases 14 talented Argentinian writers. An artist who has abandoned her work in Silvina Ocampo's "The Drawing Lesson" is brought face-to-face with her younger self: a girl with a pinafore, hair ribbon and infinite artistic promise. In "A Memory of Punkal," Angel Bonomini describes an even eerier confrontation, as a man wandering the streets of a deserted city examines a pile of corpses and recognizes one--his own. A writer who despises the abasement of modern fiction agrees to judge a "Short Story Contest" on the theme of supermarkets; Marcos Aguinis's hilarious tale shows the hapless judge swamped with such literary jewels as "Jesus Goes Shopping" and "Yoghurts of Death." In Adolfo Bioy-Casares's "The Windowless Room," a tourist killing time in Berlin follows a mysterious stranger to what the stranger maintains is the edge of the universe: an empty, nondescript room in a building that resembles an M. C. Escher drawing. Some of the stories, which were written or published in the 1980s, have previously appeared in the U.S. British-based di Giovanni is a veteran translator of Jorge Luis Borges.