Forbidden love was a forbidden topic. Decorum was everything in society, where Catholicism dictated the terms, and in literature, where a code of decency governed writers and readers alike. To women were left the pale love stories that conducted appropriate partners in proper settings to socially acceptable outcomes. So it was in Latin America well into the twentieth century.

The stories in this volume announce a dramatic change, a transformation of the literature of love in Latin America, and of the role even the nature of women in this most feminine literary tradition. These stories, by...

Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer takes place in the new free market era of personal choices and relations: a chaotic, sometimes hopeful, often comic world that has supplanted the old order of political terror and clearly demarcated ideological divides. The novel s vaudeville qualities, with characters shuffling on and off the page in rapid succession, are complemented by its exhilarating air of parody. Dreams draws ingeniously upon the sentimentality and ephemera of popular culture quoting radio and TV shows, song lyrics, newspaper items, and bits of gossip while also offering a...

No one can be closer to another than a mother to her unborn child. No one, that is, except unborn twins jostling for space in the womb. In this concise and inventive novel, a twin brother and sister vie for attention from the reader much as they competed for room before their birth. Their prenatal intimacy and jealousy interlace until they can hardly recognize who is who. The chaos originating at the very moment of the twins' conception gains dramatic proportions when they enter the world male and female. From the moment of their births, everything changes. The lives of the family members...

A gentle maiden aunt who has been victimized for years unexpectedly retaliates through her talent for making life-sized dolls filled with honey. The Youngest Doll, based on a family anecdote, is a stunning literary expression of Rosario Ferre s feminist and social concerns. It is the premier story in a collection that was originally published in Spanish in 1976 as Papeles de Pandora and is now translated into English by the author. The daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico, Ferre portrays women loosening the constraints that have bound them to a patriarchal culture. Anger takes...

A member of Brazil's avant-garde in its heyday. Patricia Galvao (or to use her nickname, Pagu) was extraordinary. Not only was her work among the most exciting and innovative published in the 1930s, it was unique in portraying an avant-garde woman's view of women in Sao Paulo during that audacious period.Industrial Park, first published in 1933, is Galvao's most notable literary achieve-ment. Like Doblin's portrayal of Berlin in Alexanderplatz or Biely's St Petersburg, it is a book about the voices, clashes, and traffic of a city in the middle of rapid change. It includes...

Forbidden love was a forbidden topic. Decorum was everything in society, where Catholicism dictated the terms, and in literature, where a code of decency governed writers and readers alike. To women were left the pale love stories that conducted appropriate partners in proper settings to socially acceptable outcomes. So it was in Latin America well into the twentieth century.

The stories in this volume announce a dramatic change, a transformation of the literature of love in Latin America, and of the role even the nature of women in this most feminine literary tradition. These stories, by...

In a State of Memory is a novelistic memoir about exile, displacement, and return. Tununa Mercado explores the psychological and physical effects of the narrator's transition into a life in exile: the splintering of her identity, the difficulties of incorporating herself into a host culture, her physical illness, and the haunting memories of her past and the loved ones she left behind. In exile the narrator is constantly confronted with the vicariousness of her experiences-she wears secondhand clothes, buys secondhand furniture, and experiences other people's lives at second hand. After...

Erotic entanglements, startling revelations, a furtive intruder, even a possible murder? Not at all what the students of Mind Control class envisioned when they gathered on a ranch outside Buenos Aires for a relaxing weekend. But here nothing is quite what it seems, least of all Magdalena herself, who while recounting the weekend's events, changes her name as often as she changes her mind.Within the taut framework of a murder mystery, Alicia Steimberg weaves a tale far more concerned with who-is-it than with whodunit. In what is probably the celebrated author's most interesting and complex...

For middle-aged Cecilia, the rainforest represents both solace and tenuously controlled danger, as she discovers when she follows the same path each day from her hotel at a Brazilian spa into the surrounding jungle. Although her daily forays are designed to help leave her painful past behind, Cecilia s thoughts return to her deceased husband, her drug-addicted son, and her own place in the world. These thoughts are her only company until the present intrudes once more in the unlikely form of a fellow patient at the spa, a North American man who might represent a second chance.

In...

Cinderella s sisters surgically modify their feet to win the prince s love. A werewolf gathers up enough courage to visit a dentist. A medium trying to reach the afterworld gets a recorded message. A fox and a badger compete to out-fool each other. Whether writing of insomnia from a mosquito s point of view or showing us what happens after the princess kisses the frog, Ana Maria Shua, in these fleet and incandescent stories, is nothing if not pithy except, of course, wildly entertaining. Some as short as a sentence, these microfictions have been selected and translated from four...