NEW ISLANDS: AND OTHER STORIES
María Luisa Bombal
"Each of the female protagonists in these five stories faces the grinding social expectation and reality of quiet compliance to the desires of men. And each, in her own way, creates entirely new, often magical worlds through her imagination. In "The Final Mist," a middle-aged spinster marries her first cousin a year after the death of his beloved first wife. At first only mildly distressed by this loveless union and her boring husband, a man who wears decorum "as though it were a suit of armor," she is changed forever after a silent and intensely passionate night with an unknown man. Who was he? Where is he? Was he only a dream? In "The Tree," Brigida, known for being "as silly as she is pretty," marries her father's old friend, Luis. There is no love but she doesn't mind; she has the quiet, cool intimacy of her dressing room with a window shaded by a rubber tree which fixed the room "in shadow, quiet and ordered. Everything seemed to be held in an eternal and very noble equilibrium. That was life." In the title story, both Don Sylvester and Juan Manuel fall in love with Yolanda, but her magic cannot protect them from the pain of love and death. Written in fluid and acutely observant prose, New Islands is a collection of fable-like stories about the secret lives many women live." —Jesse Larsen in 500 Great Books by Women.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paperback, 9780374528249
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SCHOOL OF THE SUN
Ana Maria Matute
Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Kerrigan
"A vivid and somber tale of two young cousins, bits of human flotsam left by the Spanish Civil War…. Its telling is skillful [and] Elaine Kerrigan has put it into English worthy of the Spanish text." —Mildred Adams, New York Times Book Review
Ana Marí Matute won the most recent Miguel de Cervantes Prize in Spain. This is an older book, but still in print.
Columbia University Press, paperback, 9780231069175
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MADWOMEN: THE "LOCAS MUHERES" POEMS OF GABRIELA MISTRAL
Gabriela Mistral
Edited and Translated from the Spanish by Randall Couch
A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century, and winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral's most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning.
From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting "madwomen" who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral's poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral's final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated "madwoman" than most have ever known.
University of Chicago Press, paperback, 9780226531915
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SHORT STORIES BY LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN: THE MAGIC AND THE REAL
Edited by Celia Correas de Zapata
Celia Correas de Zapata, an internationally recognized expert in the field of Latin American fiction written by women, has collected stories by thirty-one authors from fourteen countries, translated into English by such renowned scholars and writers as Gregory Rabassa and Margaret Sayers Peden. Contributors include Dora Alonso, Rosario Ferré, Elena Poniatowska, Ana Lydia Vega, and Luisa Valenzuela. The resulting book is a literary tour de force, stories written by women in this hemisphere that speak to cultures throughout the world. In her Foreword, Isabel Allende states, "This anthology is so valuable; it lays open the emotions of writers who, in turn, speak for others still shrouded in silence."
Modern Library, paperback, 9780812967074
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