Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real

This book was published in 1990 and contained 32 pieces by 31 writers, from 13 nations and Puerto Rico. It gathered together many Latin American female writers, who didn't begin to receive due attention in earlier anthologies in English for the region until starting from the mid-1980s. The oldest writers it contained were Bolivia's María Virginia Estenssoro (1902-70), Paraguay's Josefina Pla (1909-99), Chile's María Luisa Bombal (1910-80), Argentina's Luisa Mercedes Levinson (1910-87), Cuba's Dora Alonso (1910-2001), Venezuela's Antonia Palacios (1910-2001) and Mexico's Elena Garro (1916-98). Those born in the 1920s and 30s included Marta Traba, Clarice Lispector, Nélida Piñon, Carmen Naranjo, Rosario Castellanos and Elena Poniatowska. The youngest were those born in the 1940s: Isabel Allende, Liliana Heker, Rosario Ferré and Christina Peri Rossi. Writers such as Laura Esquivel, born later, and Gabriela Mistral and Carmen Lyra, born before 1900, weren't included. Brazil's Dinah Silveira de Queiroz and Lygia Fagundes Telles were other, more contemporary writers who weren't selected. As far as could be judged, the pieces ranged from the 1930s to the 1980s, with the main focus on the last few decades. Argentina had the greatest number of selections, with Levinson, Orozco, Traba, Valenzuela, Kociancich, Heker and Glickman, followed by Mexico, with Garro, Dueñas, Castellanos, Dávila and Poniatowska. Although the collection aimed to highlight female writers in the region, it provided only brief biographies for the authors and almost no information on the dates of publication or sources for the stories it contained. The stories were of many types. A number were good at conveying their female protagonists' shifting mental landscapes as they considered or struggled against their husband (Bombal, Castellanos), revenged themselves on man and fate (Levinson), fantasized about love (Guerra), relived moments of deepest intimacy with a former lover (Palacios), meditated on what it meant to have a child (Estenssoro), recalled a youthful obsession with the worlds of fragrances and shoes (Duenas), or faced old age and approaching death (Lispector). Others contained a narrator but gave most attention to the surrounding characters. For example, a story by Llano about a family that found its dead relatives appearing on the other side of a mirror in their home. Or Glickman's story set in the past, describing relationships among her elderly Jewish relatives and friends, emigrants from persecution in Europe. Most of the stories were set in the present, more or less. Others were set in the past: the story by Glickman, or a story by Kociancich, which took its inspiration from a well-known woodcut from the Renaissance picturing a knight, death and the devil. Another, by Pla, depicted the final moments of a former Spanish conquistador, dying in bed in the new land, old and isolated from those around him. One, by Yáñez Cossío, took place in the future. It had no main c

I loved the collection of different stories providing and showing magical realism and how it is used. I would recommend it to anyone doing a study on latin american women like I am. Very helpful, with neat stories! Check it out!