This anthology contains 34 stories; all but one of them were originally published after 2000, and most in the past two years. All were written by Mexican-born authors. All are short, and some are extremely short, lasting no more than three or four pages. They range in tone from delirious to grim, and exhibit various attitudes toward the marvelous intrusions into the mundane which they recount: embarrassed and regretful, slyly ambiguous, reluctantly accepting, prosaic. They occupy the memory stubbornly, insisting on their own eccentric logics, powered by the writers’ dark or shining visions, steered via authorial voices that can be disarmingly direct, cuttingly ornate, or deceptively quiet.

El jardín zoológico borgiano es una recopilación extensa, variopinta, si bien ágil, de criaturas mitológicas y literarias que van desde centauros, arpías, ictiocentauros o centauros-tritones, unicornios o nagas, por mencionar a los más ampliamente difundidos que se presentan como auténticas especies fantásticas compuestas de numerosos individuos o bien seres únicos e irrepetibles, como Pegaso, Escila, Garuda, el Fénix, el Ave Rock, el Behemoth, el Cancerbero, el Kraken, al lado de entidades tan escurridizas y sutiles como los seres térmicos, crocotas y leucocrocotas, animales de los espejos, animales metafísicos o animales esféricos. Varias de las criaturas soñadas por Kafka asoman sus confusas y tímidas cabezas en estas páginas, así como las cantadas por otros grandes literatos como C. S. Lewis, Plinio, Dante, Ariosto, fray Luis de León y algunos poetas y sabios indios, chinos y musulmanes. Un verdadero deleite deparan al lector estas descripciones, amenizadas con el inimitable estilo de Borges, cazador de aporías, laberintos e hipálages, ilustrados con citas de grandes autores que, cuando no se ofrecen en el original castellano, que es en contados casos, se proponen en traducciones escogidas, selectas, salidas no pocas veces de la pluma del mismísimo Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), el hombre de letras más brillante que produjo el siglo XX hispanoamericano y quizá hispánico en su conjunto.

 

by Mazen Kerbaj

Letter to the Mother

Because of you I fancied killing a hundred times.

Translated by Mazen Kerbaj and Ahmad Gharbieh

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by Nawel Louerrad

Demonsterate

I’ve been wearing this tutu since I was a kid.

Translated by Canan Marasligil

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by Héctor G. Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López

from “The Eternonaut,” Part II

There are other survivors!

Translated by Erica Mena

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by Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié

A Great Step Forward: Memoir of the Famine

Even the roaches in the village are dying of hunger.

Translated by Edward Gauvin

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by Jérôme Ruillier

from “Les Mohameds”

I loved Renault like you’d love a mistress.

Translated by Edward Gauvin

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by Krysztof Gawronkiewicz

Romanticism

Our technology enables the resurrection of an incomplete body.

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Escribió El jardín colgante en 2011. “Un año indescriptible y extraño; vi cosas que nunca había visto antes, como la plaza de Catalunya llena de gente llamando a la revolución, un fugaz despertar de la consciencia; la magia negra del capitalismo, con agencias de calificación expulsando a políticos de sus cargos… y todo con la sensación de que no había futuro, de que todo se había acabado”. A partir de ahí, se preguntó cómo se había llegado a tal situación de catástrofe y llegó a la conclusión de que el inicio estaba en 1977, cuando España despertaba a la democracia. Él no vivió esos días, pero ha leído y se ha documentado, sin exceso —“porque el exceso de documentación perjudica a la novela”— y desde el presente, se plantea si “aquello fue un sueño o lo es ahora, si entonces era realidad y ahora no”.

Xingu and Other Stories is an uneven collection of stories from a writer in the midst of her most fertile work. The good stories show similar concerns of her more famous novels such as the house of Mirth. When she is examining the lives of couples or more commonly the lives of women she is a powerful writer that doesn’t write polemics, but creates heroines that self aware and willing to try to size what should be theirs. They may not get it, but they’ll try. Interspersed among those stories, though, are less than convincing ghost stories, atrocity stories from World War I, and tales of revenge. Nevertheless, Xingu has some gems in it.

The eponymous story Xingu  is a funny send up of conformity and phony intellectualism. A group of women get together regularly and invite a writer to talk to the group about their book. The writers quickly bore of the  morally bland middle class women and their pedantic questions. Nor are the women are capable of  having their own opinions about the works. They all seek a kind of respectable consensus on what each book means and it makes for a conservative and unimaginative group. One day when they are trying to entertain a pompous writer one of the members mentions begins to talk about a place called Xingu. Everyone at the lunch fakes knowledge of Xingu, but none of them have heard of it. As the story builds, they begin to get more and more extravagant in their claims. Finally, the woman who first mentions Xingu , turns the table on them all and tells them what Xingu means, deflating the pedantic women of the group. It is a funny story although the punch line is a little long. Wharton can occasionally draw a story out a little too far.

Autres Temps… is classic Wharton with its subtle and nuanced look at women in society. In the story, a woman returns to New York after her divorce, a scandalous idea in during the late 1800′s, forced her to flee to Europe and a new life. She returns because her daughter has just divorced, too, and is going to remarry and she wants to be there to help her, because she remembers what a disaster it was for her. When she arrives, though, her daughter reminds her everything is alright. No one seems upset, even the women of her generation, the women she was friends with at one time. She begins to think that her exile is over, but slowly her daughter begins to suggest, perhaps she is too tired to come to dinner with everyone. Maybe she should stay in her rooms. It is a brilliant moment, both in the coldness of her daughter who should have been grateful for her help, and the identification of that all too common trait where mores change for the young, but those of the older generation still remember the past sins. It doesn’t so much as mater what she did, just that she did something at some point and should return to her exile.

The Long Run is perhaps the most cutting of all the stories and reminiscent of The House of Mirth. It it, a single man and a married woman are friends and lovers. They have been friends for years and the desire between them is strong. One night she comes to him and says she can be his. She is ready to give everything up for him and will run away that very evening. Although he says he wants it and would love to leave the factory he owns and write again with as his muse, he won’t do it. He says it wouldn’t be good for her. He is not the free thinker he is, but now the respectable factory owner more concerned about what people will think about him. Yet he is aware of his situation:

…she had married that pompous stick Phillip Trant because she needed a home, and perhaps also because she wanted a little luxury. Queer how we sneer at women for wanting the thing that gives them half their attraction!

But she is too independent for this and refuses his half measures that are more interested in respectability than love. She also sees that the winner if they do things his way is him. She won’t have any power. She wisely says no in the best line of the book:

…one way of finding out whether a risk is worth taking is not to take it, and then to see what one becomes in the long run, and draw one’s inferences.

The novella The Bunner Sisters is a strange tale about drug addiction, or as the drug addict is called in the book, drug fiends. The drug in question is opium and though Wharton never shows anyone taking it, it is the axis of the story. Even in the opening pages of the book there is a sense of danger and squalor populated by drunks and it sets the tone for the book. Describing the neighboorhood the Bunner Sisters live in she says,

These three house fairly exemplified the general character of the street, which, as it stretched eastward, rapidly fell from shabbiness to squalor, with an increasing frequency of projecting sign-boards, and of swinging doors that softly shot or opened at the touch of red-nosed men and pale little girls with broken jugs.

In other words, saloons, the so called scourge of preprohibition America. The story is about two lonely sisters who have a small millinery shop. They live a solitary life until one buys the other a clock for her birthday. The man they bought it from has a little shop and both women hold out hopes of marring him, but it is the younger sister finally marries him. Unfortunately, he is an opium addict and the older sister worries constantly about what happened to her sister who went to St. Louis wither her husband. Finally, the sister returns and tells a tale of addiction, poverty, violence, that finally ends in a still born baby and death by tuberculosis. It is a frightful tale of what can happen when you have no one and you are dependent on a man. The younger sister renounces her freedom in the little shop, although it isn’t much freedom, and chooses unwisely. It is a story that is only one step away from Dickens. It is hard to say, though without knowing more about drug usage in her works and in general (I do know in her novel Custom or the Country there is an overdose), whether this falls under prescient or after school special. That said, it is in the general tenor of the social realist problem novel. At the same time, it is well drawn picture of the two spinsters, ones you can imagine she probably met at one time or anther. And Wharton does capture the loneliness well.

As for the rest of the stories, we have Coming Home which is purported to be a story from American ambulance drivers in France during World War I. It is a story of a Frenchwoman who is caught behind enemy lines. She has no other option than put up with the Germans, letting them stay in her house, eat her food, and though it is not said, rape her. When the French take the town back her brother learns the truth and when finding the German officer who raped her he murders him, leaving as if he had been mortally wounded. It isn’t a bad story as they go, but it fits right in there with German atrocity stories and is as much propaganda as anything else. Wharton was quite committed to the war and had already written Fighting France and had helped set up hospitals, and would later write the novel, A Son at the Front. It was also the only story written for the collection and shows a hurried rush to write something relevant.

The rest of the stories are so-so. One is a ghost story with a tiresome ending that has little suspense and another is a mysterious murder that really isn’t that mysterious.

Xingu has some great Wharton and it has some less than stellar work, but the good ones are excellent. Now if only publishers would pay $2000 for stories like these as they did in her time.

The Future Is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction brings together twenty-three Latin American writers who were born between 1970 and 1980. The anthology offers an exciting overview of contemporarySpanish-language literature and introduces a generationof writers who came of age in the time of military dictatorships, witnessed the fall of theBerlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the birth of the Internet, the murders of Ciudad Juárez,Mexico, and the September 11th attacks in New York City.The anthology features: Oliverio Coelho, Federico Falco, and Samanta Schweblin (Argentina);Giovanna Rivero (Bolivia); Santiago Nazarian (Brazil); Juan Gabriel Vásquez and AntonioUngar (Colombia); Ena Lucía Portela (Cuba); Lina Meruane, Andrea Jeftanovic, and AlejandroZambra (Chile); Ronald Flores (Guatemala); Tryno Maldonado and Antonio Ortuño (México);María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra (Nicaragua); Carlos Wynter Melo (Panama); Daniel Alarcónand Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru); Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (Puerto Rico); Ariadna Vásquez (DominicanRepublic); Ignacio Alcuri and Inés Bortagaray (Uruguay); and Slavko Zupcic (Venezuela).

Hi Everyone,

Just got word from our editorial team that some of the translations for the Mexican Drug War Issue have come in so I’m able to tell you a bit more about what’s in the issue. Work featured will include extracts from Magali Tercero’s reporting on living under “drugtatorship”, “Notes on the Violence in Sinaloa, Mexico,” Rafael Perez Gay’s short story “Road to Juarez,”  in which a man’s senile father claims to have been an undercover federal agent infiltrating a drug cartel, Fabrizio Mejia Madrid’s nonfiction piece, “The Mystery of the Parakeet, the Rooster, and the Goat,”  based on  statements made by drug lord Ricardo ”El Valde” Valderrama, and Luis Felipe Fabre’s poem “Notes on a Theme of a Zombie Cataclysm.” Guest editor Carmen Boullosa is interviewed on how the drug war has impacted writers directly and also contributes a poem mourning all that Mexico has lost. Translations still to come include Hector de Mauleon, Yuri Herrera, Rafael Lemus, and Juan Villoro.

There’s only 20 days left. Please help us spread the word.

Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light will tell you just about everything you will ever need to know about Lisbon and Portugal during World War II. Perhaps, too much depending on you interests. Neill Lochery not only writes about the Salazar government at war, but about the intrigues and, in many ways, the gossip of those who passed through the city. The book is best at laying out Salazar’s plan to stay neutral and how he was able to play the two sides off of each other. As a man without any other goals than staying in power and making Portugal modern, he was able to sell tungsten to Germany without the least scruples in taking German gold (some of which the Bank of Portugal is said to have, Richsbank stamp and all). And with the allies, especially Britain which Portugal had long had alliances, he also sold materials for gold. As long as one side seemed more powerful than the other, he attempted to favor them more, short of joining the war. During the early years of the war he was quite welcoming to Germany, but he didn’t want to join the war, nor did he want Spain to invade. Spain had made several different plans to invade during the war, but Salazar was able to avoid it. He was always cautious, and even in 43 when Germany didn’t look as strong as it had, he delayed granting access to the Azores to the Allies.It is in the context of the scheming man that Lochery notes that any good that came out of Portugal’s neutrality during the war came about because it suited Salazar or he had no control over it. The Jewish refuges are a case and point. While Salazar didn’t kick Jews out of Portugal, he also didn’t want to grant them entry visas. It was his diplomatic officials early in the war who disobeyed orders and were able to allow Jews to escape through Lisbon.

Lisbon itself was a reflection of Salazar. It was full of spies, refugees, and people taking advantage of the situation. With all the refugees and the limited transportation options out of the country many were stranded there and had to do what ever it took to get out. For the rich such as the Gugenhiems, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Hollywood stars like Leslie Howard they stayed in the best hotels and lived a life that had nothing to do with the deprivations of the war. It is here, in the more biographical sections, that the book suffers a bit. Not that it is badly written, it just isn’t that interesting to me. Especially, the part about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. At least I know now how self-absorbed he was but other than that I don’t really care. There are definitely some sections one can skip over.

It is an interesting book, but for me only half of the book was interesting. But if you are interested in the history of Portugal during the war you can’t go wrong with this book.

A superb political reporter, Martínez perfected in his novels the blending of strict journalistic fact with the devices of fiction. He said that he had learned the craft when, in the late 60s, the exiled dictator Juan Domingo Perón summoned him to his Spanish estate to help him write his memoirs which, as the young journalist quickly realised, were largely fictitious. The result of the experience, published in the mid-80s, was The Perón Novel. It was followed a decade later by his masterpiece, Santa Evita, which García Márquez, usually reticent in his praise, said was “the novel I’ve always wanted to read”. The posthumous publication of Purgatory shows a writer at the height of his craft, and is a fitting conclusion to the work of one of Latin America’s most remarkable novelists.

Via