The "first lady of Argentine letters," Victoria Ocampo is best known as the architect of cultural bridges between the American and European continents and as the founder and director of Sur, an influential South American literary review and publishing house.

In this first biographical study in English of "la superbe Argentine," originally published in 1979, Doris Meyer considers Victoria Ocampo's role in introducing European and North American writers and artists to the South American public—through the pages of her review, through translations of their work, and through lecture tours and recitations. She examines Ocampo's personal relationships with some of the most illustrious writers and thinkers of this century—including José Ortega y Gasset, Rabindranath Tagore, Count Hermann Keyserling, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Monnier, Vita Sackville-West, Gabriela Mistral, and many others. And she portrays an extraordinary woman who rebelled against the strictures of family and social class to become a leading personality in the fight for women's rights in Argentina and, later, a steadfast opponent of the Perón regime, for which she was sent to jail in 1953.

Fifteen of Victoria Ocampo's essays, selected from her more than ten volumes of prose and translated by Doris Meyer, complement the biographical study.

As a young girl growing up in Spain, Ana Larragoity Cubillas is powerfully drawn to Puerto Rico by the diaries of an ancestor who traveled there with Ponce de León. And in handsome twin brothers Ramón and Inocente—both in love with Ana—she finds a way to get there. She marries Ramón, and in 1844, just eighteen, she travels across the ocean to a remote sugar plantation the brothers have inherited on the island.

Ana faces unrelenting heat, disease and isolation, and the dangers of the untamed countryside even as she relishes the challenge of running Hacienda los Gemelos. But when the Civil War breaks out in the United States, Ana finds her livelihood, and perhaps even her life, threatened by the very people on whose backs her wealth has been built: the hacienda's slaves, whose richly drawn stories unfold alongside her own. And when at last Ana falls for a man who may be her destiny—a once-forbidden love—she will sacrifice nearly everything to keep hold of the land that has become her true home.

Esmeralda Santiago is the author of the memoirs When I Was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, which she adapted into a Peabody Award-winning film for PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre", and The Turkish Lover; the novel América's Dream; and a children's book. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she lives in New York.

Appearing for the first time outside of Cuba when it was published in 2009, this bold collection of short stories provides an intimate and critical view of Afro-Cuba. Inés María Martiatu's stories—presented here in the original Spanish, with facing-page English translations—span postcolonial Cuba of the early twentieth century, the First Republic, the "victorious revolution," and contemporary life in the streets of Havana. Taking real risks as an Afro-Cubana, Martiatu confronts conflicts about identity, race, marginalization, and discrimination.

The history of the Caribbean, as part of the African diaspora, is reflected in the textures of life in Cuba, its music, rituals and myths, the Church and Santería, past and present. While race is unquestionably fundamental to the stories, they are at the same time rooted in the universality of the human experience. The vantage is that of an unflinching, yet compassionate observer of society—one who simultaneously turns an introspective mirror on the complicated layers of self.

Inés María Martiatu is a writer, theater critic, and cultural historian. Her other published works include Rite as Representation. Caribbean Ritual Theatre, and Something Good and Interesting. She lives in Havana.

Who Is Ana Mendieta? is a cultural biography of a Cuban American feminist artist working on the cusp of rebellion and regression. Jackson Pollack careens into a tree, killing his lover and himself; Frida Kahlo begins to be received as a significant painter, not only the muse of Diego Rivera; William Burroughs plays William Tell with an apple on his wife's head; Carolee Schneemann pulls a feminist screed out of her vagina and reads it aloud at a performance; Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol. Ana Mendieta, whose bold work about the female body and violence was changing the course of art history, "went out the window" of the New York City apartment she shared with her husband, sculptor Carl Andre, at the height of her career. Andre was tried and acquitted of her murder, and the legacy of Mendieta has been shrouded ever since.

"Ana's death is one of millions that, despite four decades of feminist struggle, remain underestimated—social crimes that have yet to be fully confronted…. The very directness of the graphic novella is an ideal vehicle for the outrage women feel about the extent of domestic and general violence against us. May there be many more visual outcries like this one, to avenge the loss of women like Ana Mendieta."—Lucy Lippard, from the introduction.