The Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares, popularly known as an author of "fantastic literature," has inspired generations of Latin-American readers and writers with his elegant humor and prophetic imagination. Bioy (as he is often referred to) began writing as the young colleague of the metaphysical fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, within the cosmopolitan sphere of Sur magazine--founded by the influential woman of letters Victoria Ocampo--in Buenos Aires in the early 1930s. Borges prefaced Bioy's best-known work, La invención de Morel (1940; translated as The Invention of Morel, 1964), with a virtual manifesto of fantastic literature, reacting against what he believed to be the impoverished artifice of realism. Citing La invención de Morel as a perfect contemporary model of the genre, he placed the twenty-six-year-old writer's first successful novella in the company of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Franz Kafka's The Trial (first published as Der...