The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories

by Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto

• ISBN13: 9780195130850
• ISBN10: 0195130855
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-07-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 central part of this tradition, from Fray Bartolome de las Casas' narrative protests against the Spanish Conquistadors' abuses of Indians, to the world renowned Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges, to the contemporary works of such masters as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rosario Ferre, and others. 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.

Author Biography

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria is Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literatures, Yale University. He is the author of Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative and coeditor of theCambridge History of Latin American Literature.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction	p. 3
The Colonial Period	p. 23
How the Men Were Parted from the Women	p. 25
A Maiden's Story	p. 28
Tocay Capac, The First Inca	p. 31
Plague of Ants	p. 34
The Story of Pedro Serrano	p. 39
The Adventurer Who Pretended That He Was a Bishop	p. 43
Amorous and Military Adventures	p. 46
A Deal with Juana Garcia	p. 50
New Nations	p. 57
The Slaughter House	p. 59
The Tiger of the Plains	p. 73
He Who Listens May Hear - To His Regret: Confidence of a Confidence	p. 76
Fray Gomez's Scorpion	p. 85
Where and How the Devil Lost His Poncho	p. 89
Midnight Mass	p. 95
The Contemporary Period	p. 103
The Death of the Empress of China	p. 105
Yzur	p. 111
The Decapitated Chicken	p. 118
The Baby in Pink Buckram	p. 125
The Man Who Resembled a Horse	p. 131
The Braider	p. 141
The Man Who Knew Javanese	p. 144
Peace on High	p. 153
The Christmas Turkey	p. 159
The Daisy Dolls	p. 165
The Photograph	p. 201
The Clearing	p. 205
The Garden of Forking Paths	p. 211
Journey Back to the Source	p. 221
The Tree	p. 233
The Legend of 'El Cadejo'	p. 242
Encarnacion Mendoza's Christmas Eve	p. 247
The Third Bank of the River	p. 256
The Image of Misfortune	p. 261
Tell Them Not to Kill Me!	p. 284
Hahn's Pentagon	p. 290
The Switchman	p. 312
The Featherless Buzzards	p. 318
Meat	p. 327
Unborn	p. 330
The Night Face Up	p. 337
Cooking Lesson	p. 345
The Doll Queen	p. 354
The Walk	p. 367
Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon	p. 383
The Challenge	p. 390
The Crime of the Mathematics Professor	p. 400
Buried Statues	p. 406
A Woman's Back	p. 419
The Warmth of Things	p. 428
Penelope	p. 433
The Threshold	p. 438
The Parade Ends	p. 443
When Women Love Men	p. 462
Selected Bibliography	p. 473
Acknowledgments	p. 477
Author Index	p. 481
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.