Fire from the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru by Susan E. Benner (Editor), Kathy S. Leonard (Editor), Marjorie Agosin (Foreword by)

Product Details

Synopsis

This anthology provides an opportunity for English-speaking audiences to read previously untranslated fiction by women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Much of this work is inspired by an awareness of social injustice—particularly for women, indigenous groups, and other marginalized members of society and by a desire to transcend that injustice through personal revelation. Most of the stories focus on women's inner lives and their struggles to make sense of experience.

Like Mónica Bravo's heroine attempting to outwit death, or the mayor's wife, in a story by Alicia Yánez Cossío, surviving the news of her husband's infidelity, many of the protagonists are strong women, wise and shrewd. Perhaps the same could be said of the twenty-four authors who have drawn from their experience and imagination to create these compelling, often haunting, stories of life, liberty, love, and loss.

Library Journal

In the last 15 years, many English-language readers have been introduced to Latin American women's literature in translation, a field dominated by writers from Argentina and Chile. This anthology of short stories by 24 contemporary women writers now brings us women's writings from the Andean countries of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. The stories, for the most part dark, center on women's interior lives. In Ecuadoran Monica Bravo's "Wings for Dominga," an old woman outwits Death herself as she knits her memories into her shroud. Bolivian Marcella Gutierrez wryly retells the story of Adam and Eve and Lilith as a courtroom drama. Peruvian Pilar Dughi describes a bored, hopeless young woman who turns to terrorism. Catalina Lohmann, another Peruvian, uses a lighter tone to satirize dictatorships in her chronicle of a bus ride through the neighborhoods of Lima. Each story is preceded by a critical biographical introduction, and the book also includes an excellent bibliography of Spanish-language short story collections and of general bibliographies of the literature of these countries. Highly recommended for large public libraries and academic collections.Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.

Biography

Susan Benner is an instructor of English and linguistics at Iowa State University and an Iowa Art Fellow in the Master of Fine Arts in translation program at the University of Iowa.

Kathy Leonard is professor of Spanish and Hispanic linguistics at Iowa State University, Ames, and was a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Bolivia. She was awarded an NEH grant for 2003 to translate the Bolivian novel Bajo el oscuro sol by Yolanda Bedregal.

Marjorie Agosín is professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. She is well-known as a poet and activist and is the author or editor of numerous books.