Alicia Borinsky - Böcker

Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer takes place in the new "free market" era of personal choices and relations: a chaotic, sometimes hopeful, often comic world that has supplanted the old order of political terror and clearly demarcated ideological divides. The novel's vaudeville qualities, with characters shuffling on and off the page in rapid succession, are complemented by its exhilarating air of parody. Dreams draws ingeniously upon the sentimentality and ephemera of popular culture—quoting radio and TV shows, song lyrics, newspaper items, and bits of gossip— while also offering a sterner, more nuanced view of public and private relations. It is in large measure this mix of elements—"popular" and "high" culture, sentimentality and political understanding, vaudeville and arch satire—that makes Dreams an exemplary postmodern novel.

Alicia Borinsky argues that the contemporary Latin American novel does not just ingeniously dismantle the referential claims of the more traditional novel; it offers a postmodern version of the lessons taught by fiction.Latin American fiction, perhaps the most inventive literature of recent decades, seems marked by its self-reflexivity, by its playful relationship to history and the everyday, and by its concerns with the ways in which language works. But is it, Borinsky asks, really a literature whose primary goal is to raise metafictional questions about writing and reading? While the effects of this literature include dismantling the illusions of realism, naturalism, and historicism, the haunting and disturbing energy of its major works lies in their capacity of invoke a region beyond literature through literature.Theoretical Fables progresses by way of close readings of the works of eight canonical-and not quite canonical-Latin American Authors. Borinsky argues that the Latin American "theoretical fable" has its origins in the work of the early twentieth-century Argentinean writer Macedonio FernÁndez. In this light she studies the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia MÁrquez, Julio CortÁzar, JosÉ Donoso, Adolfo Bioy Cesares, Manuel Puig, and Maria Luisa Bombal.

Tango and fairy tales mix freely in this seductive, irreverent, and sensual collection of poems. From a city that is at once Buenos Aires and all other cities, Alicia Borinsky brings to life reluctant mothers, slightly mad teachers, selfless wives, neighborhood witches, best friends, sworn enemies, torturers, vamps, cheats, and lovers - a gallery of characters who wink and boldly gaze back at us. Vignettes become poems and poems become vignettes, reflections that dance, reveal, conceal, enchant, confess, and dream."Frivolous Women" invites us to visit the darker and lighter sides of laughter and love and feel the tenderness of recovered memories as we cross the bridges of relationships and stroll down the mysterious streets of childhood. Alicia Borinsky reminds us that the revelations of poetry are always intimate and dangerous. Cola Franzen's agile and insightful translation, crafted in close collaboration with the poet, is faithful to the letter and spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition.