SOURCE: A review of Historias desaforadas, in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, Autumn, 1987, p. 606.

Faris is an American educator, critic, and author. In the following review of Historias desaforadas, Faris comments on the collection's "melancholy tone of nostalgia and resignation."

The ten stories of Historias desaforadas provide a good introduction to the work of Bioy Casares, an early master of magical realism, better known to the world at large as the collaborator of Borges. Most of the stories inhabit that literary locus of magical realism, the domain of liminality, in which characters or states of being exist on the fringes of society or normality and thus lead us off the beaten track into unexplored or undiscovered countries of the imagination. In order to do this convincingly, they often begin, as do the stories of Borges or Cortázar or Fuentes, in the casual midst of rigorously everyday reality...