Book Description

Contemporary Latin American Literature reflects the wealth of great writers of Latin America over the last hundred years, including Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Noble Prize winners Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. The selections--almost 100 works in their original form--include English definitions for difficult Spanish words.

Customer Reviews (3)

Wonderful anthology
Buy two copies, give one to your best Spanish-speaking friend, and keep the other to give to your grandchildren after you've worn it out.

Great Review for Proficient Non-Native Speakers
I've spoken Spanish since the age of 13 (I'm 60 now) and have been married to a native speaker of Spanish (Puerto Rico) for almost 30 years.Although I don't live in an Hispanic country, my exposure to Spanish is almost on a daily basis, mostly by virtue of household conversations and satellite television programs.What I've always found useful to keep my language active at a professionally competent level are well-chosen anthologies of literary excerpts by established authors in their original format.This anthology delivers exactly that.Ms. Varona-Lacey has done a fine job of selecting from across a wide spectrum of genres to not only introduce popular authors to an interested audience, but also to ensure that the level of difficulty is just right to provide that linguistic challenge to those who want to raise their non-native fluency in the language to higher levels of expertise.Technical and seldom-encountered words are glossed and explained below the page of text, as well as brief explanations of historical personages/events to facilitate comprehension.Her selection of authors is quite inclusive and I cannot think of anyone to add to her list of contributors, although no doubt other reviewers can probably come up with a name or two.I hold a PhD in Foreign Language Education and am a former university professor of both Arabic and Spanish.I would have loved to have used this selection in my third or fourth year Spanish classes had it been available when I was still teaching.

a great resource for advanced Spanish learners
This book contains short stories, poems, and excerpts from a variety of well-known latin american authors such as Octavio Paz, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, and Pablo Neruda. Each selection includes an introduction of the author, pre-reading notes, footnotes of difficult words with English translation, and post-reading questions. ... Read more

Book Description
This innovative college-level textbook for third-year college Spanish courses introduces the student to Latin American literature using a unique bilingual approach in which an English translation parallels the Spanish original. As such it is appropriate for courses which attempt to make the transition from basic language-acquisition courses to upper level elective language courses. Dr. Child also employs an historical approach, starting with the pre-Columbian oral traditions and covering five centuries through the Mexican Revolution; other features include an introductory biographical section, numerous graphs, charts, and a glossary of terms. ... Read more

Book Description
The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories Edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria When Latin American writers burst onto the world literary scene in the now famous "Boom" of the sixties, it seemed as if an entire literature had invented itself over night out of thin air. Not only was the writing extraordinary but its sudden and spectacular appearance itself seemed magical. In fact, Latin American literature has a long and rich tradition that reaches back to the Colonial period and is filled with remarkable writers too little known in the English-speaking world.The short story has been a central part of this tradition, from Fray Bartolome de las Casas' narrative protests against the Spanish Conquistadors' abuses of Indians, to the world renowned Ficciones ofJorge Luis Borges, to the contemporary works of such masters as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rosario Ferre, and others. Now, in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, editor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria brings together fifty-three stories that span the history of Latin American literature and represent the most dazzling achievements in the form. In his fascinating introduction, Gonzalez Echevarria traces the evolution of the short story in Latin American literature, explaining why the genre has flourished there with such brilliance, and illuminating the various cultural and literary tensions that resolve themselves in "magical realism." The stories themselves exhibit all the inventiveness, the luxuriousness of language, the wild metaphoric leaps and uncanny conjunctions of the ordinary with the fantastic that have given the Latin American short story its distinctive and unforgettable flavor: From the Joycean subtlety ofMachado de Assis's"Midnight Mass," to the brutal parable of Julio Ramon Ribeyro's "Featherless Buzzards," to the startling disorientation of Alejo Carpentier's "Journey Back to the Source," (which is told backwards, because a sorcerer has waved his wand and made time flow in reverse), to the haunting reveries of Maria Luisa Bombal's "The Tree." Readers familiar with only the most popular Latin American writers will be delighted to discover many exciting new voices here, including Catalina de Erauso, Ricardo Palma, Rubin Dario, Augusto Roa Bastos, Christina Peri Rossi, along with Borges, Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, and many others. Gonzalez Echevarria also provides brief and extremely helpful headnotes for the each selection,discussing the author's influences, major works, and central themes. Short story lovers will find a wealth of satisfactions here, in terrains both familiar and uncharted.But the unique strength of The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories is that it allows us to see the connections between writers from Peru to Puerto Rico and from the sixteenth century to the present--and thus to view in a single, unprecedented volume one of the most diverse and fertile literary landscapes in the world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Great Resource of Latin American Literature
This was a required book for a college course, but the stories are interesting and entertaining none the less.

The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent
There are too many stories here that can not be called great literature. Latin American writing is better than this! This anthology does it a great disservice. ... Read more

Book Description
Volume 3 covers the history of Brazilian literature, from the earliest writing through to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Portuguese-language traditions; it also contains an extensive bibliographical section in which annotated reading lists relating to the chapters in all three volumes of the History are presented. These bibliographies are a unique feature, further enhancing the work's immense value as a reference tool. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

be aware of the 3 volume set
Overall, I love the Cambridge histories of literature.Unfortunately, this one, on Amazon, was a little misleading.Be aware that there is a 3 volume set for Latin American Literature!When I ordered this, they sent me Volume 3, which only covers Brazil.I sent it back and ordered from the publisher.Apparently the 3 volume set is difficult to find!

For Latin Americanists, this is a bible, pure and simple.
One of my prized possessions.Reading these essays, I get a sense of exhileration about the field of Latin American literature and a concomitant sense of devasataion that I will never achieve the mastery evidenced by the contributing scholars. There is great information in this work, and--if you truly love the field--exciting overviews as well.The three volumes are truly the springboard for additional study that they were intended to be, and they really replace Enrique Anderson Imbert, Bellini, and others as the first "go to" handbook.For Latin Americanists, this collection is a bible, pure and simple. ... Read more

Book Description
Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with fictional portraits of such figures, and no novel of this genre is as universally esteemed as Augusto Roa Bastos's I THE SUPREME, a book that draws on and reimagines the career of the man who was "elected" Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814. By turns grotesque, comic, and strangely moving, I THE SUPREME is a profound meditation of the uses and abuses of power--over men, over events, over language itself. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

History beats fiction
This is a wonderful book, by a great writer. The catch is that very often it will be misunderstood, and associated with the group of fantastic south american writers, like Garcia Marquez. Instead the story is basically for real (the story of the last years of Paraguay dictator Gaspar Francia, who ruled the country from 1813 to 1840), and most of the mentioned documents are authentic, or at least plausible. Roa Bastos has played on the borderline between history and fiction, but most readers will not know this, and take for fiction what are very important and interesting historical facts, that would deserve a different approach and attention. This is the only (but rather painful) fault I find in an otherwise beautiful work.

A novel of the highest importance
There are three great novels about the Latin American dictator and all of them are very different.Miguel Asturias' Mr. President deals with a backwater banana republic where the president for life's presence itself is minor.What occurs instead is the lethal working out of a hideously unjust system which crushes and destroys all who resist and those who are caught in its clutches.Then there is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, an example of high modernism at its most brilliant.In sentences of increasingly serpentine length (in the end consisting of the final chapter of forty-five pages) Garcia Marquez deals with an aged dictator who has ruled for centuries and is capable of every iniquity (such as serving up a cabinet minister for his treacherous colleagues to eat) while living in a world of pretend power and real submission (he has to sell his country's sea to pay off the Americans).This book is also high modernist, but is very different.Instead of the fantastic elements of the Autumn of the Patriarch we have here the story of the founder of Paraguay, Dr. Francia.Dr. Francia consolidated his country's independence by creating a regime of isolation and absolute power.He expelled the Jesuits and set up his own Catholic Church so it would not be beholden to Rome.He was utterly ruthless and the result, according to E. Bradford Burns was an autarky that probably benefited the masses more in terms of literacy and nutrition than any other Latin American country of the time.Its fate, however, was to be crushed by the surrounding countries in the great war of 1870-73 where the male population was almost literally devastated.

No venal tinpot hack, Dr. Francia appears as a man of frightening sincerity, in an account that is of direct revelance to the fate of Castro's Cuba.I, the Supreme begins with a proclamation in which the dicators calls for the decapitation of his corpse and the lynching of all his ministers.It continues with tales of prisoners forced to live in boats travelling down the rivers of Paraguay without ever stopping.We read of Francia's dialogue with a sycophantic Vicar General ("How long did the trial of the infamous traitors to the Fatherland last?As long as it was necessary in order not to rush to judgement.They were granted every right to defend themselves.In the end every recourse was exhausted.It might be said that the case was never closed.It is still open.Not all the guilty parties were sentenced to death and executed."), who then goes on to condemn his priests for siring dozens and hundreds of illegitimate children.Like Lenin and indeed Stalin he rants against the jungle of bureaucracy that he himself has created, he outsmarts the greedy surrounding oligarchies who wish to absorb Paraguay, he reminds his civil servants not to express and exploit the Indian population.We read reports of how school children are indoctrinated to see their great leader ("The Supreme Government is very old.Older than the Lord God, that our schoolmaster...tells us about in a low voice.)The book is a masterpiece of polyphony, filled with many voices and viewpoints, combined with a richness of metaphor and incident and a complexity of moral vision that have few competitors this century.Writing for a country that has possessed only brief and shadowy vestiges of liberty, Roa Bastos deals with its pain in a way that should be required reading for all who care about democracy.

Takes you into the the mind of the dictator
In what has to be a fictional note at the end of the book, the author claims that he is not such, indicating that he merely copied parts of historical documents, writings and tales, thus the real "author" of this book is history itself and not him, who he says is merely the "compiler." The work is indeed true to history; the history about José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the controversial Dictator of Paraguay between 1814-1840 who used to sign his official decrees not with his name but the sentence that is the title of this book. This is a wonderfully complex book; not easy to read. Sometimes fascinating paragraphs are unexpectedly cut with some note form the "compiler" indicating that the rest is illegible because the page is partly burned, which lets you to think that it was indeed copied from an old document; while at other times you read fascinating dialogs and monologues which you would think had to be fictional; but it is not as simple: You cannot tell truth from fiction because the truth seems fictional and the fiction tells truth. Truth that comes to you in the form of insights about the state of mind of a dictator, about absolute power, and about the soul of a country that owns its independent existence to its first dictator's determination to be its supreme ruler. It is an utterly fascinating book.

excellent complex book
if you want to understand power get this book.

Sublime
A sublime book with fabulous ideas and use of language. Very much worth buying. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
Writers, translators, and critics explore the cultural politics and transnational impact of Latin American literature. ... Read more

Book Description
A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture examines the cultural and historical contexts behind the work of major Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel García Márquez.

• Places major Latin American authors in the complex cultural and historical contexts that have compelled their distinctive fiction, essays and poetry
  
• Reflects the changes that have taken place in cultural theory and literary criticism since the latter part of the 20th century
  
• Allows the reader to more accurately interpret the esteemed but demanding literature of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, César Vallejo, and Gabriel García Márquez
  
• Special attention is paid to key authors whose work has defined a period, or defied borders
  
• Additional essays engage the reader with in-depth discussions of forms and genres, and discussions of architecture, music and film
  
• Each chapter includes a selected bibliography and recommendations for further reading

Book Description
This book is the first of its kind-a comprehensive account of transvestism and the performance of gender in Latin American literature and culture. It explores the figure of the transvestite and his/her relation to the body through a series of canonical Latin American texts. By analyzing works by Alejo Carpentier, Joseacute; Donoso, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig, alongside critical works in gender studies and queer theory, Sifuentes-Jauregui shows how transvestism operates not only to destabilize, but often to affirm sexual, gender, national, and political identities. ... Read more

Book Description
Susan C. Brantly's introduction to the writings of Isak Dinesen elucidates the subtle complexities of a Scandinavian writer whose works have attracted a large, passionate following in her homeland, throughout the world, and especially in the United States. Highly regarded by a generation that followed her televised trip to America in the 1950s and by a later generation mesmerized by the Oscar-winning 1985 film Out of Africa, Dinesen gained her initial literary success in the United States. Brantly suggests that despite Dinesen's wide appeal, her irony, allusiveness, obliquity, and mystery elude many readers, depriving them of a full appreciation of the writer's artistry. In this guide Brantly illumines the easily missed literary references, cultural kaleidoscope, and other complexities that enrich not only Dinesen's fictional works but also the memoir she wrote of her time in Kenya.

Brantly addresses the ambiguous qualities of Dinesen's life and literature that have caused critics to disagree on fundamental points of interpretation, examines her ties to English Gothic, German Romanticism, and other nineteenth-century trends, and considers her work within the contexts of modernism and postmodernism. Brantly reveals the thought and care that Dinesen devoted to the construction of her stories, her expansive knowledge of world literature, and the great pleasure awaiting readers as they unravel the mysteries embedded in her texts. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Understanding Isak Dinesen
This is quite possibly the best book on Karen Blixen ever written.Brantly has synthesized most all scholars into a comprehesive look at Blixens work. ... Read more