Bolivia is a land-locked nation of mountains and high, arid plains, a place one native writer calls the "Land of Silence". From this fundamental base, Bolivian writers express provincial customs and values, decry political oppression, and sound universal themes of isolation and resignation. Editor Sandra Reyes has gathered a panoramic sampling of the work of 23 poets and 18 fiction writers, for a revealing a look at Bolivian consciousness.

Born in the small Extremaduran town of Moraleja in 1946, Spanish poet Pureza Canelo, at the age of twenty-five, published her first collections of poetry, Celda verde and Lugar comun (winner of the 1970 Adonais Prize). By 1979, she had settled upon an understanding of her own aesthetic evolution, which she elaborated in Habitable (Primera poetica). Then, in 1986, after a period of disenchantment with the written word during which she published only two chapbooks-Espacio de emocion (1981) and Vega de la paloma (1984)-she redefined her position in Tendido verso (Segunda poetica). Designed to...

This book examines strategies of transformation (becomings, image-making, and the phantasmagoric) that figure in four stories and a novel by Gothic fiction writer Pilar Pedraza (Spain, 1951). While critics have long associated the Bildungsroman with Gothic fiction, this study takes a close look at the developmental process itself: the means by which a protagonist, young or old, might transcend a deprived status to achieve a complete sense of self. Pedraza's works imply that, regardless of the path followed, a character's ability to think differently is crucial to progress. The fixed image,...