Beyond the Border: A New Age in Latin American Women's Fiction

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813017858 ISBN 13: 9780813017853

Publisher: University Press of Florida, 2000

A collection of 15 short stories by female, Latin American writers, including Isabel Allende and Luisa Valenzuela. Ranging across boundaries of geography and gender, the work covers such topics as incest, race, politics, sexual needs, love, old age, and child abuse.

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish

From Publishers Weekly:

This collection of short fiction by contemporary Latin American women concerns travel "beyond the border" in two senses. It presents work by writers who, with the exception of Isabel Allende and Luisa Valenzuela, are largely unknown to English-language readers. In addition, its strongest stories deal with characters propelled beyond the boundaries of familiar experience. In "A Passion for Donna Summer" by Dominican Aida Cartagena Portalatin, the voice of the '70s disco diva exhorts a black girl to abandon her Catholic boarding school. She does, only to make the bitter discovery that her will to freedom, like Summer's music, is subverted by the strictures of a racist society. The narrator in Uruguayan Sylvia Lago's heartbreaking "Homelife" recounts how her husband's involvement with the mysterious Felipe ends in the destruction of her family and drives her from nearly everything she knows. These works set a high standard which, unfortunately, not all the pieces meet. Nevertheless, in collecting the stories and supplying bibliographies on the authors, the editors--academics in the field of Hispanic and Latin American studies--have made a valuable contribution.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.