Secret Weavers Series – serie

"This collection is painful, disturbing, and rewarding. Freeman and three other translators transform Storni's razor-sharp poetry into English versions that invite constant rereading. This is a poetry of fatal beauty that leads toward unavoidable death, but not before freeing the poet to leave everything she can behind."--Ray Gonzalez, Bloomsbury Review

A landmark collection that rescues the voices of the great women writers of Latin America letters, many of them distinguished in their own countries but largely unrecognised abroad. The collection shows a wide range of themes, images, and languages encountered in the new territories of the Latin American narrative written by women.

Gabriela Mistral's name evokes a constellation of contradictory images: a rural schoolteacher and first Latin American recipient of the Nobel Prize, a poet who sang to children but never had any of her own, a provincialist and a universal traveller. All these references to her mythic legacy contain some truth and form part of the legacy of Gabriela Mistral. This anthology, the first to translate the broad spectrum of her work into English, gathers selections from both her poetry and her prose, and reflects all phases of her work.

Our image of Korea is shaped by the memory of the Korean War and the country's recent emergence as a fast-developing Asian industrial power. English-speaking readers are largely unaware of Korea's long literary tradition and the work of its contemporary writers. This anthology presents work by half a dozen contemporary writers, all of whom won the prestigious Korean People's Literary Award, and offers insights into this little-known culture and people. The stories, which focus on ordinary Korean people and the impact of war on their lives, are introduced by Korean scholar Dr David McCann.

"An important chorus of our south of the border sisters for us Latinas to hear...Here we have much knowing and glorying from Argentina to Brazil to my own Dominican Republic -- toes to waist to breasts of the hemisphere!" -- Julia Alvarez.

The 25 stories in this collection -- written since 1959 by Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican writers -- make accessible Caribbean literature long lost to most readers in this country because of differences in language, politics, and culture. Despite the variations in style, setting, and period to be expected in such an anthology, there are some common threads here, notably the evocation of Caribbean heat and light and the intertwining of the political with the personal. Police massacres rend the fabric of everyday life in Ana Lydia Vega's moving, multifaceted 'Lillianne's Sunday' and disrupt a delicate voodoo ritual in Mayra Montero's 'Corrine, Amiable Girl'; and the body of a notorious guerrilla leader is a family pawn in Pedro Peix's multi-voiced 'Requiem for a Worthless Corpse'. An impressive collection, which opens the door to a body of work 'sandwiched between the North American and Latin American continents and literatures', in the words of author Julia Alvarez, and too long ignored.

The first English-language gathering of the voices of Mexican women, most of whom began to publish in the 1960s, when an emerging middle class supported a boom in Mexican letters. Well-known writers such as Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and writers just beginning to receive critical acclaim, tell diverse stories of Mexico's women, from La Malinche up to present-day women trying to find their places in a country with a strong patriarchal tradition.

This novel is set in the sixteenth century Argentina of the earliest Spanish settlements, when Juan de Garay came down the Parana River from Asuncion, Paraguay, to found the of Santa Fe in 1573. After he left Santa Fe in early 1580, to re-establish the port of Buenos Aires, seven of the mestizos who had been among Santa Fe's first settlers rose up in rebellion against the Spanish town authorities. This is the historical setting where this novel begins, as an old soldier who came down the river with Garay remembers the hardships and violent injustices of the town's first years.

Born in 1931, Delia Dominguez is one of the most important poets of Chile. "Woman Without Background Music" is the first volume of her poems to be published in English and collects poems from all phases of her work in a bilingual edition.

Born in Cuba in 1902, Dulce Maria Loynaz established her reputation as a poet in the first half of the 20th century. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, she retreated to her beloved house in Havana, vowing never to write poetry again. Although her class privilege gave her the means to leave the island, she steadfastly refused to do so, even after her husband left in 1961. Her fierce loyalty to Cuba so devoid of political ideology, touched a nerve with those seeking to reclaim the cultural wealth of their nation. After she received the Miguel de Cervante Prize, the most prestigious writing award in the Spanish language, in 1992, Loynaz came to be seen as a national jewel, a holy relic of a Creole aristocracy sufficiently loyal in its ideals about Cuban national independence that it could be respectfully win a place in post-revolutionary Cuba. She died in 1997.

The writing of Cuban women writers is virtually unknown in this country. Ten of the best Cuban women writers who have risen to prominence in the last decade of the 20th century are included in this anthology which focuses on the challenging period after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of its economic support to the island. The stories here have been selected both for their individual excellence and for their collective panorama of a stressful and fascinating decade. An introduction is provided by Luisa Campuzano, one of contemporary Cuba's most insightful critics. The authors include: Karla Suarez, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Adelaida Fernandez de Juan, Nancy Alonso, Aida Bahr, Ena Lucia Portela, Mirta Yanez, Mylene Fernandez Pinatado, Marilyn Bobes, and Sonia Bravo Utrera. The stories reflect a wide range of experiences in the new Cuba and give the reader a window into an unknown culture that lies 90 miles off the US coast. The translators include Mary Berg, Pamela Carmell, Dick Cluster, Sara E Cooper, Cristina de la Torre, Nancy Festinger, and Anne Fountain.

When this coming-of-age novel was first published in Rivera's native Dominican Republic, it shocked readers with its frank look at the sometimes tawdry life of a young Dominican woman. Caught between the onslaught of US consumer culture and the evolving Marxist theology that spread through the Caribbean after the Cuban Revolution, the story reflects the loss of any sense of identity as the girl and her best friend move toward adulthood. They look for role models in musicians and writers, but as loss piles on loss -- loss of cultural identity, loss of lovers, loss of a child, loss of dreams -- they move every closer to knowing that "the worst solitude is that which is shared.

"A Mapmaker's Diary" gathers a selection of poems from both published and unpublished work in a bilingual format by this verbal acrobat, juggler of words, and magician of memory.

"The wink of an eye and we are transported to an unexpected realm. In very few impeccable lines, Shua's micro short stories open new vistas to our perception of dreams, myths, fairy tales, even of our everyday life. To read her is to discover another dimension in fiction: small is absolutely beautiful, and thrilling, and often disquieting."-Luisa Valenzuela Quick Fixes, a bilingual collection, reflects Ana Maria Shua's ingenious blending of precise language, incisive humor, and incredible imagination into a unique style of sudden fiction. Ana Maria Shua was born in Buenos Aires and has published over forty books.

"This is a gem of a collection of Olga Orozco stories, beautifully rendered into English. This wise selection of stories reveals Orozco's lyrical, as well as mysterious, prose. The translators provide an excellent introduction to Orozco's haunting and illuminating saga of childhood on the Argentine pampa."-- Marjorie Agosin, Wellesley College This collection introduces readers to the hallucinatory yet lucid world that Olga Orozco's young narrator, Lia, inhabits and animates with her prodigious imagination and the reality of small-town life on the Argentine plains in the 1920s. Olga Orozco (1920--1999) is considered to be one of the major Argentine writers of the twentieth century.