Now, in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, editor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria brings together fifty-three stories that span the history of Latin American literature and represent the most dazzling achievements in the form. In his fascinating introduction, Gonzalez Echevarria traces the evolution of the short story in Latin American literature, explaining why the genre has flourished there with such brilliance, and illuminating the various cultural and literary tensions that resolve themselves in "magical realism." The stories themselves exhibit all the inventiveness, the luxuriousness of language, the wild metaphoric leaps and uncanny conjunctions of the ordinary with the fantastic that have given the Latin American short story its distinctive and unforgettable flavor: From the Joycean subtlety of Machado de Assis's "Midnight Mass," to the brutal parable of Julio Ramon Ribeyro's "Featherless Buzzards," to the startling disorientation of Alejo Carpentier's "Journey Back to the Source," (which is told backwards, because a sorcerer has waved his wand and made time flow in reverse), to the haunting reveries of Maria Luisa Bombal's "The Tree." Readers familiar with only the most popular Latin American writers will be delighted to discover many exciting new voices here, including Catalina de Erauso, Ricardo Palma, Rubin Dario, Augusto Roa Bastos, Christina Peri Rossi, along with Borges, Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, and many others. Gonzalez Echevarria also provides brief and extremely helpful headnotes for the each selection, discussing the author's influences, major works, and central themes.
Short story lovers will find a wealth of satisfactions here, in terrains both familiar and uncharted. But the unique strength of The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories is that it allows us to see the connections between writers from Peru to Puerto Rico and from the sixteenth century to the present--and thus to view in a single, unprecedented volume one of the most diverse and fertile literary landscapes in the world.
"The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories is a superb collection, brilliantly edited by Roberto González Echevarría. His introductions are enlightening and informative; the stories themselves, whether Hispanic American or Brazilian, are always of high aesthetic merit, covering the entire range from Borges to Arenas."--Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University
| Preface | ||
| Introduction | 3 | |
| Pt. I | The Colonial Period | 23 |
| How the Men Were Parted from the Women | 25 | |
| A Maiden's Story | 28 | |
| Tocay Capac, The First Inca | 31 | |
| Plague of Ants | 34 | |
| The Story of Pedro Serrano | 39 | |
| The Adventurer Who Pretended That He Was a Bishop | 43 | |
| Amorous and Military Adventures | 46 | |
| A Deal with Juana Garcia | 50 | |
| Pt. II | New Nations | 57 |
| The Slaughter House | 59 | |
| The Tiger of the Plains | 73 | |
| He Who Listens May Hear - To His Regret: Confidence of a Confidence | 76 | |
| Fray Gomez's Scorpion | 85 | |
| Where and How the Devil Lost His Poncho | 89 | |
| Midnight Mass | 95 | |
| Pt. III | The Contemporary Period | 103 |
| The Death of the Empress of China | 105 | |
| Yzur | 111 | |
| The Decapitated Chicken | 118 | |
| The Baby in Pink Buckram | 125 | |
| The Man Who Resembled a Horse | 131 | |
| The Braider | 141 | |
| The Man Who Knew Javanese | 144 | |
| Peace on High | 153 | |
| The Christmas Turkey | 159 | |
| The Daisy Dolls | 165 | |
| The Photograph | 201 | |
| The Clearing | 205 | |
| The Garden of Forking Paths | 211 | |
| Journey Back to the Source | 221 | |
| The Tree | 233 | |
| The Legend of 'El Cadejo' | 242 | |
| Encarnacion Mendoza's Christmas Eve | 247 | |
| The Third Bank of the River | 256 | |
| The Image of Misfortune | 261 | |
| Tell Them Not to Kill Me! | 284 | |
| Hahn's Pentagon | 290 | |
| The Switchman | 312 | |
| The Featherless Buzzards | 318 | |
| Meat | 327 | |
| Unborn | 330 | |
| The Night Face Up | 337 | |
| Cooking Lesson | 345 | |
| The Doll Queen | 354 | |
| The Walk | 367 | |
| Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon | 383 | |
| The Challenge | 390 | |
| The Crime of the Mathematics Professor | 400 | |
| Buried Statues | 406 | |
| A Woman's Back | 419 | |
| The Warmth of Things | 428 | |
| Penelope | 433 | |
| The Threshold | 438 | |
| The Parade Ends | 443 | |
| When Women Love Men | 462 | |
| Selected Bibliography | 473 | |
| Acknowledgments | 477 | |
| Author Index | 481 |
Overview
When Latin American writers burst onto the world literary scene in the now famous "Boom" of the sixties, it seemed as if an entire literature had invented itself over night out of thin air. Not only was the writing extraordinary but its sudden and spectacular appearance itself seemed magical. In fact, Latin American literature has a long and rich tradition that reaches back to the Colonial period and is filled with remarkable writers too little known in the English-speaking world. The short story has been a ...