/lit/ - Literature

I'm surprised no one talked about the South American Edgar Allan Poe, Horacio Quiroga, a man that does not only represent uruguayan or argentinian culture, but the whole "Gaúcho" people. I recommend the short story The Decapitated Chicken, here you can see the maestry of his conduction of the horror genre that, personally, I find very original and fresh, even with the Poe comparisons.

Also, his life strongly reverberated through his work in the most fascinating way. First, when he was only a baby, his father was accidentally killed when a shotgun went off on a family outing. Later his step-father shot himself, and in 1902 Quiroga accidentally shot and killed one of his best friends and literary companions. In 1915 his first wife, unable to endure the hardships of life in the jungle of northern Argentina, where Quiroga insisted on living, committed suicide by taking a fatal dose of poison, leaving the widower with two small children to raise. Then, Quiroga himself, when he realized he was incurably ill with cancer, took his own life. This is a man that fought his whole life against the triviality of death, not accepting its randomness to the end, and wrote this struggle in his books.