Tale
The Black Sheep and Other Fables
La oveja negra y demás fábulas
Augusto Monterroso · 1969
Synopsis
Brief fables in which the animals reason like men of letters or of power: the black sheep of a distant country, whom its flock shoots; the monkey who wanted to be a satirical writer and dares not pin anyone down; the frog who wanted to be an authentic frog and sought in the eyes of others the proof of her worth; the fox who, after two successful books, decides to write no more.
Context
The collection appeared in 1969 in Mexico City, from Joaquín Mortiz, in the country where its author had lived in exile since 1944. In it he took up the Aesopian fable in order to turn it against itself: no final moral, or a moral that mocks the one we expect, and animals that no longer represent vices but the postures of intellectuals. It came ten years after his first collection of stories, the one with the dinosaur.
Who it is for
Very short fables, often a page long. The irony rests on the gap between the animal and its reasoning.
Prizes and reception
Translated into some twenty languages, it established the very short fable as a Latin American genre in its own right and brought its author international recognition.