A young girl spends her summer vacation in a country house where a tiger roams … A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer’s intended victim …

Originally published in hardcover as End of the Game and Other Stories, the fifteen stories collected here-including Blow-Up, which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film of the same name-shows Julio Cortazar’s nimble capacity to explore the shadowy realm where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.