This short, engaging book details the life history of Esperanza Ruiz and four generations of her family. Their stories recount a century of change in a poor highland community in Panama, and how ordinary people struggle, survive, and impact history.

A modern classic for our time and for all time-this beloved, award-winning bestseller resonates with fresh meaning for each new generation. Perfect for fans of Kate DiCamillo, Christopher Paul Curtis, and Rita Williams-Garcia. Pura Belpre Award Winner * "Readers will be swept up." -Publishers Weekly, starred review Esperanza thought she'd always live a privileged life on her family's ranch in Mexico. She'd always have fancy dresses, a beautiful home filled with servants, and Mama, Papa, and Abuelita to care for her. But a sudden tragedy forces Esperanza and Mama to flee to California and settle in a Mexican farm labor camp. Esperanza isn't ready for the hard work, financial struggles brought on by the Great Depression, or lack of acceptance she now faces. When Mama gets sick and a strike for better working conditions threatens to uproot their new life, Esperanza must find a way to rise above her difficult circumstances--because Mama's life, and her own, depend on it.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.

Esperanza Speaks examines a century-long process of socioeconomic change in rural Panama through the experiences of one woman, Esperanza Ruiz, and four generations of her family. The intimate narrative shows how ordinary people, through their choices and actions, are affected by and, in turn, can affect how history unfolds. Readers see Esperanza’s family as both victims and protagonists in their own histories. Born into rural poverty with limited options, they still find small openings to try to improve their lives. Sometimes successful, sometimes not, they survive by drawing on their only abundant resource: each other. Based on twenty field visits over the course of fifty years, Esperanza Speaks is the result of a dedicated anthropologist’s long-term engagement with the individuals of a single community, and a beautiful example of ethnographic storytelling.

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With the recent shift in Cuba-US relations stemming from the relaxing of travel restrictions and an influx of American visitors, interest in Cuba and its culture has increased substantially. A new emphasis has been placed on the island country’s many cultural and artistic achievements, specifically in film. Cuban cinema is recognized around the world as having produced some of the most celebrated works originating from Latin America—such as Fresa y Chocolate and La Muerte de un Burócrata—as well as many prominent artists—including directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Humberto Solás. In A Cuban Cinema Companion, editors Salvador Jimenez Murguía, Sean O’Reilly, and Amanda McMenamin have assembled a collection of essays about more than100 films across six decades, including feature films, documentaries, and animation. These entries also provide information on directors, actresses, and actors of Cuban cinema. Entries range from films like Retrato de Teresa to Buena Vista Social Club and include descriptions of each film’s plot, themes, and critical commentary, as well as comprehensive production details and brief suggestions for further reading. Beginning with the victory of the Cuban revolution—from the first ten years of what is often referred to as Cuba’s “Golden Age” of film to the present—this volume offers readers valuable insights into Cuban history, politics, and culture. An indispensable guide to one of the great world cinemas, A Cuban Cinema Companion will be of interest to students, academics, and the general public alike.

In the first comprehensive feminist critique of autobiography as a genre, Leigh Gilmore incorporates writings that have not up to now been considered part of the autobiographical tradition. Offering subtle and perceptive readings of a wide variety of texts-- from the confessions of medieval mystics to contemporary works by Chicana and lesbian writers-- she identifies an innovative practice of "autobiographics" which covers the entire spectrum of women's self-representation.

Narratives of Community draws together essays that examine short story sequences by women through the lenses of Sandra Zagarell’s theoretical essay, “Narrative of Community.” Reading texts from countries around the world, the collection’s twenty-two contributors expand scholarship on the genre as they employ diverse theoretical models to consider how female identity is negotiated in community or the roles of women in domestic, social and literary community. Grouped into four sections based on these examinations, the essays demonstrate how Zagarell’s theory can provide a point of reference for multiple approaches to women’s writing as they read the semiotic systems of community. While “narrative of community” provides an organizing principle behind this collection, these essays offer critical approaches grounded in a wide variety of disciplines. Zagarell contributes the collection’s concluding essay, in which she provides a series of reflections on literary and cultural representations of community, on generic categorizations of community, and on regionalism and narrative of community as she returns to theoretical ground she first broke almost twenty years ago. Overall, these essays bring their contributors and readers into a community engaged with a narrative genre that inspires and affords a rich and growing tradition of scholarship. With Narratives of Community, editor Roxanne Harde offers a wealth of critical essays on a wide variety of women's linked series of short stories, essays that can be seen overall to explore the genre as a kind of meeting house of fictional form and meaning for an inclusive sororal community. The book itself joins a growing critical community of monographs and essay collections that have been critically documenting the rise of the modern genre of the story cycle to a place second only to the novel. But more than simply joining this critical venture, Narratives of Community makes a major contribution to studies in the short story, feminist theory, women's studies, and genre theory. Its introduction and essays should prove of enduring interest to scholars and critics in these fields, as well as continue highly useful in the undergraduate and graduate classrooms. — Gerald Lynch, Professor of English, University of Ottawa The introduction, by Prof. Harde, and the 20 essays in the book dialogue with Sandra Zagarell’s proposed paradigm “narratives of community”, which other scholars have called “short story cycles” or “story sequences”. Zagarell’s proposal organically blends a generic model with a thematic concern to explain how women writing community often turn to a particular narrative style that itself supports the literary creation of that community. Harde and the volume contributors appropriate this brilliant and engaging proposal in the context of other crucial discussions of the genre—notably Forest Ingram’s germinal study, J. Gerald Kennedy’s work, and those by Robert Luscher, Maggie Dunn and Anne Morris, James Nagel, Gerald Lynch and (I’m honored to note), my own study on Asian American short story cycles—to expand the range of the critical discussion on the form. The quality and diversity of the essays remind us that there is still much work that can be done in the area of genre studies. The volume emphasizes an important caveat to one vital misconception: that although writers like James Joyce or Sherwood Anderson are thought to be the precursors or, even, “inventors” of the form, women’s sequences, by Sara Orne Jewett and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others, actually predate the work of the male writers. This fact suggests that the development of the form as a genre that attends to specific perspectives or creative formulations of and by women needs to be considered in depth. The temporal scope of the volume is therefore a vital contribution to scholarship on the form, as is the diversity of the writers analyzed. Indeed, the examination of narratives by writers from different countries and that focus on characters from different time periods, racial, religious, or ethnic communities, and social class impels a multilayered reading of the texts that inevitably promotes a nuanced understanding of the project of each of the writers, a project that connects issues of individuality and community in varied and often surprising ways. The essays thus critically explore the notion of community in its myriad associations with the individual and as a crucial site not only for women’s action upon the world but also for her creative endeavors. The essays in the volume revisit familiar texts—Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Welty’s The Golden Apples, Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women, among others—but offer new perspectives on the way form interacts with issues of women’s communities and women creating community in these works. Significantly, it also offers readings on texts that have not been analyzed in detail from this perspective—Gaskell’s Cranford or Woolf’s A Haunted House, for example—thus contributing to a continuing conversation about the ways women write. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the new expand the paradigms of current criticism not only on the story cycle but also on women’s writing in general. —Rocio Davis, Professor of Literature, University of Navarre "Roxanne Harde’s forthcoming volume, Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, provides an abundant collection of varied responses to Sandra Zagarell’s longstanding call for further in-depth exploration of the genre that Zagarell christened “the narrative of community” in her 1988 essay linking non-novelistic narrative form with representations of female experience. As Harde observes, such narratives of community overlap significantly with the growing canon of unified but discontinuous collections of autonomous stories that critics have variously labeled as the short story cycle/ sequence/ composite . . . The essays in her collection examine a rich variety of such works by women, extending the scholarship in this area. . . Harde’s ample collection of essays presents a concerted and diverse exploration of the implications of the short story sequence form as a representation of women’s lives as part of and in conflict with membership in a community. . . . Overall, Harde’s volume is a welcome addition to current scholarship on the short story sequence, bringing in a variety of new voices and perspectives to the community of scholars who have engaged in the exploration of this paradoxical, evolving, and increasingly popular genre." — Dr. Luscher

A collection of essays exploring various aspects of Sandra Cisneros' novel "The House on Mango Street."

Feminist theory has been widely translated, influencing the humanities and social sciences in many languages and cultures. However, these theories have not made as much of an impact on the discipline that made their dissemination possible: many translators and translation scholars still remain unaware of the practices, purposes and possibilities of gender in translation. Translating Women revives the exploration of gender in translation begun in the 1990s by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s Re-belle et infidèle/The Body Bilingual (1992), Sherry Simon’s Gender in Translation (1996), and Luise von Flotow’s Translation and Gender (1997). Translating Women complements those seminal texts by providing a wide variety of examples of how feminist theory can inform the study and practice of translation. Looking at such diverse topics as North American chick lit and medieval Arabic, Translating Women explores women in translation in many contexts, whether they are women translators, women authors, or women characters. Together the contributors show that feminist theory can apply to translation in many new and unexplored ways and that it deserves the full attention of the discipline that helped it become internationally influential.