Microfictions

One of Argentina's most prolific and distinguished writers, and acclaimed worldwide, Shua displays in these microfictions the epitome of her humor, riddling logic, and mastery over our imagination. Now, for the first time in English, the fox transforms itself into a fable, and "the reader is invited to find the tail."

Cinderella's sisters surgically modify their feet to win the prince's love. A werewolf gathers up enough courage to visit a dentist. A medium trying to reach the afterworld gets a recorded message. A fox and a badger compete to out-fool each other. Whether writing of insomnia from a mosquito's point of view or showing us what happens after the princess kisses the frog, Ana Maria Shua, in these fleet and incandescent stories, is nothing if not pithy—except, of course, wildly entertaining. Some as short as a sentence, these microfictions have been selected and translated from four different books. Flashes of insight, cracks of wit, twists of logic, and quirks of language: these are fictions in the distinguished Argentinean tradition of Borges and Cortazar and Denevi, as powerful as they are brief.

One of Argentina's most prolific and distinguished writers, and acclaimed worldwide, Shua displays in these microfictions the epitome of her humor, riddling logic, and mastery over our imagination. Now, for the first time in English, the fox transforms itself into a fable, and "the reader is invited to find the tail."

Publishers Weekly

Argentinean poet Shua is a master of the bon mot. Each of these concise, lyrical pieces-somewhere between aphorism, anecdote and poem, and rarely longer than a paragraph-contains a fluid, perplexing, and (often) highly amusing thought. Shua creates a fantastically interconnected web with such strands as "Dreams," "Magic," "Literature" and "Men and Women," wherein everyday objects take on a frightening life of their own: "I vigilantly open my bedroom door trying to catch my dolls talking to each other," begins "Dolls," while the narrator of "Objects" declares, "The nightstand brings me breakfast in bed." Relations between men and women assume a primal urgency, such as in "Flattery": "This isn't the work of a human being," says a man staring at the bloody marks left in his flesh. "Come on, what a flatterer," replies the sharp-clawed narrator. Shua gives some of the well-known myths of literature her own gleeful spin, as in "Wolf," which finds Little Red Riding Hood wondering, "What does my grandmother have that I don't?" These dreamlike landscapes will delight and charm readers new to Shua's work. (Apr.)

Ana María Shua has published more than forty books in many genres, including poetry, children’s fiction, novels, and books on Jewish folklore, and her work has been translated into many languages. She lives in Buenos Aires.

Steven J. Stewart is an associate professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University–Idaho in Rexburg. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship for Translation by the National Endowment for the Arts. His translation of Devoured by the Moon: Selected Poems of Rafael Perez Estrada was a finalist for the PEN USA Translation Award.