Which Argentine author wrote the short story 'Axolotl'?

Julio Cortázar wrote the Argentine short story “Axolotl.” It first appeared in Spanish in his 1956 collection Final del juego and was later published in English in End of the Game and Other Stories in 1963.

The story follows an unnamed narrator who becomes fascinated by axolotls—salamanders with unusual external gills—at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He returns repeatedly to the aquarium, studying their stillness and enigmatic faces until the boundary between observer and animal begins to collapse. Cortázar turns a visit to a zoo into a strange meditation on consciousness, identity, isolation, and the desire to communicate.

Readers sometimes remember “Axolotl” as a straightforward animal story or confuse it with Cortázar’s more famous novel Hopscotch. Its unsettling effect comes from the first-person narration and the possibility that the narrator’s perspective has shifted into that of an axolotl. The real animals are Mexican salamanders belonging to the genus Ambystoma, while the story’s transformation remains deliberately ambiguous and fantastical.