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 Cort zar's nimble capacity to explore the shadowy realm where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.