Landscapes of A New Land: Short Fiction by Latin American Women

A landmark collection that rescues the voices of the great women writers of Latin America.

“This is so far the best anthology of Latin American women’s literature in translation published in this country. Highly recommended.”—Choice

A landmark collection that rescues the voices of the great women writers of Latin America.

“This is so far the best anthology of Latin American women’s literature in translation published in this country. Highly recommended.”—Choice

Publishers Weekly

This variegated anthology spotlights 21 accomplished authors from 10 countries. The celebrated Clarice Lispector and Luisa Valenzuela appear alongside less familiar contributors; each voice here achieves distinction. In ``An Avid One in Extremis,'' Hilda Hilst of Brazil offers a deathbed scene couched in roily stream-of-consciousness. The archives in Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi's ``The Museum of Futile Endeavors'' immortalize (in alphabetical and chronological files) hopeless efforts--such as one man's 10-year attempt to teach his dog to speak. In ``Solitude of Blood,'' Marta Brunet, from Chile, describes a woman who transcends her husband's domination through the pleasure afforded by a single phonograph record. The narrator of Mexican Margo Glantz's ``Genealogies'' reconstructs her family's history from snippets of relatives' accounts and images drawn from cinema. In ``The Enchanted Raisin,'' a fairy tale by Jacqueline Balcells of Chile, three ``absolutely unbearable'' children make their mother's life so wretched that she shrivels into a raisin. Agosin is the author of Pablo Neruda. (Dec.)

Aristocratic Chile is vividly evoked in Isabel Allende s lyrical novels, in which a family s past and future is linked inextricably with that of its country s. A writer whose dreamy, imagistic books transport the reader to another time and place, Allende is considered by many to be the heir to Gabriel García Márquez s lavish magic realism.