The award winning author of Tear This Heart Out writes a compilation of deeply personal stories imbued with the human spirit, driven by different powerful women connected by desire. Each story in this "remarkable collection" (Kirkus Reviews) reveals a different woman, yet all are linked by a single thread: the strength of desire. Vibrant, sly, wise, earthy, and full of life, these are stories that mesmerize.

A love story set in the years after the Mexican revolution.

Emilia Sauir is the daughter of a Spanish mother and Mayan herbalist father. In the midst of the hardships of the Mexican rebellions of the early-20th-century, Emilia is torn between her love for two men: a childhood friend who runs off to fight, and a peace-loving doctor.

The first major study on the works of the Mexican novelist, Angeles Mastretta, demonstrating the rich complexity and range of the author's fiction and essays. The Mexican novelist, Angeles Mastretta [b. 1949], has only recently received serious critical attention largely because her work has been seen as 'popular' and therefore inappropriate for academic study. This first major work tobe published on Mastretta seeks to demonstrate the rich complexity and range of the author's fiction and essays. In the tradition of Post-Boom Latin American women's writing, Mastretta's texts are motivated by a desire to speak primarily of the silenced experiences and voices of women. Two of her novels, referential and testimonial in style, can be placed within the Mexican Revolutionary Novel tradition and explore the Revolutionary period and its consequences in the light of female experiences and perspectives. The hitherto unexplored themes of female sexuality and bodily erotics in Mastretta's texts are also considered in this volume. Her feminist works avoid facile simplifications: heterogeneous and dialogical, they interweave the historical and the fictional, the everyday and the fantastic. The originality of Mastretta's writing lies in its elusive postmodern ambiguities: shimmering surfacesare often interrupted by unexpected depths and proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis. Jane Elizabeth Lavery lectures in Latin American Studies at the University of Kent.

This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

Emery develops the concept of an "anthropological imagination" - that is, the conjunction of anthropology and fiction in twentieth-century Latin American literature. Emery also gives consideration to documentary and testimonial writings.

"A good story and first-rate social science."—New York Times Book Review. A sinisterly funny modern-day Through the Looking Glass that begins with cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream. The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest, flexibility, and ability to make mistakes of human beings anywhere. As Nicholas Lemann put it in The New Yorker, "Krech is more than just a conventional-wisdom overturner; he has a serious larger point to make. . . . Concepts like ecology, waste, preservation, and even the natural (as distinct from human) world are entirely anachronistic when applied to Indians in the days before the European settlement of North America." "Offers a more complex portrait of Native American peoples, one that rejects mythologies, even those that both European and Native Americans might wish to embrace."—Washington Post "My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention. A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.

Mexican culture has long been the object of scholarly interest and popular curiosity, notably since the 1910 Revolution and most recently in the 1990 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries". During these eight decades in the evolution of the modern Mexican nation, shifting relations of power have constantly met with voices of opposition that have challenged the national vision of progress and unity. Textured Lives explores some of these cracks in the Mexican national edifice by examining the works of women in literature and the arts, with focus on individuals who represent crucial phases in Mexico's cultural history: Frida Kahlo and postrevolutionary nationalism, Rosario Castellanos and the promises of institutionalized revolution, Elena Poniatowska and the legacy of 1968, and Angeles Mastretta and the "golden age" of the oil boom. Schaefer argues that exploring the social context of cultural representation highlights the tensions between master narratives and these women's transgressive forays into those spaces of power. Combining literary theory, cultural analysis, gender study, and theories of artistic representation, her book embraces painting, literary journalism, the epistolary novel, and autobiographical narrative to question the traditional forms of these genres as well as to debate the boundaries between the self and the national identity.

Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture. In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists. Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.