Poems and prose by Latin America’s first Nobel Prize Laureate.

“This beautiful anthology holds the first English translation of Gabriela Mistral’s extraordinary prose and poetry . . . hidden to the mainstream no longer, here is the breathtaking lifework of a most gifted and enigmatic muse.” —NAPRA Journal

"Carlota Caufield has given us a work of great sensuality and rare luminosity, suffused with an intelligence that is both playful and meditative. Her pleasures and discoveries become ours, her tender, often sly observations are crafted for inheritance. But it is Caulfield's devotion to the daily sacred that helps inspire our own. " --Cristina Garcia The poetry of Carlota Caulfield is characterized by journeys, by a wandering memory that seeks to travel all the world's roads, to sail to all its islands. The speakers in her poems are voyagers in perpetual transit, symbols of that wandering creature that human beings inevitably turn into when they are exiled from paradise, that is to say, from their mother's womb. The poet's eye yearns to see everything, take possession of everything, with never a pause to draw a breath. An eye that perceives all, including the fleeting passage of time and space. -Issac Goldemberg "Haunting incantatory poems by Carlota Caulfield, beautifully translated by Mary G. Berg. Writing about loss and memory and the redemption that comes of confronting the wound, Caulfield summons up the inner life in the dream music of the inexpressible." --Chana Bloch

“ In this volume Caulfield writes of lenses, mirrors, dictators, numberous writers, painters, and myths, frm all period of time, which have inspired her work. She is not a feminist nor a typical Latina poet. She does not write of her memories of Cuba, but not anguishing over its loss. Nor does she lament any descrimination, even about her background: “No one knows anything about me, only that I am a poet in transit/that I speak English with a certain indefinable accent/and that my nationality is cryptic”. She is a poet of the world, once exiled, but now she has matured, and she attempts to connect more with images her readers can comprehend.”

—Lou Pearson -  Chasqui

This collection introduces English-speaking readers to the hallucinatory yet lucid world that Orozco’s young narrator, Lía, inhabits and animates with her prodigious imagination and the reality of small-town life on the Argentine plains in the 1920s. It is this landscape of her childhood home that shapes her narrative voice.

It is the landscape of her childhood home that shapes her narrative voice. In this mirage-like world of shifting dunes, shimmering horizons, crumbling buildings and vibrating fields of sunflowers, the young girl Lía—Orozco’s alter ego—watches and wonders, acts and is acted upon. Fixed in the center of the erratic exterior world is the family home, the refuge to which the child retreats for protection and solace, but which at times resembles a space of mystery and menace. 

Olga Orozco (1920 – 1999) is considered to be one of the major Argentine writers of the 20^th century. She won over a dozen major prizes and awards for her poetry and short stories, and has been translated into at least fifteen languages.

Mary Berg is a writer and translator. She has translated a number of books from Spanish, including I’ve Forgotten Your Name by Martha Rivera, River of Sorrows by Libertad Demitropulos, Ximena at the Crossroads by Laura Riesco,  The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado and The Poet and the Sea by Juan Ramon Jimenez. She teaches at Harvard Extension and Brandeis University.

Melanie Nicholson is Associate Professor of Spanish at Bard College.  She is the author of Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry (2002).  Her articles on Latin American poetry have appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Letras  Femeninas, Crítica Hispánica, and Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, among others. She has published translations in Yale Review, Puerto del Sol, and Denver Quarterly.

Orozco’s stories portray, in impressionistic, and dreamy language, a childhood spent in a small town on the Argentine pampa.

“This is a gem of a collection of Olga Orozco stories, beautifully rendered into English. This wise selection of stories reveals Orozco's lyrical as well as mysterious prose. The translators provide an excellent introduction to Orozco's haunting and illuminating saga of childhood on the Argentine pampa.”

— Marjorie Agosin, Wellesley College

“A Talisman in the Darkness presents, for the first time in English, the spell-binding short stories of Olga Orozco (1920-1999), the Argentine surrealist poet, astrologer, and student of Gnosticism. The stories reconstruct scenes from a childhood on the pampas while drawing the reader into an intensely paradoxical universe of mysterious signs and omens, alternately enchanting and unnerving. At the core of the narratives is a girl child who, though episodes of unsought illumination, encounters for the first time aspects of both the visible and the hidden worlds.”

—Naomi Lindstrom

“Loynaz sees a shimmering world alive with emotion and high spirit. Even disappointment takes on a charged life, a flight, in her hands.” –The Small Press Book Review

“Reading Magali García Ramis is always a treat. She knows how to tell a good story and keep you interested to the end. Happy Days, Uncle Sergio, a novel about growing up in Puerto Rico in the fifties, rings with the quiet power of real life recreated with warmth, tenderness, and simplicity.” —Ana Lydia Vega

“These stories offer a glimpse of Cuba that is unique: This is not the exotic island, this is not an island of rebels and caudillos. This is an island peopled with women who are trying to make it from day to day; but to do so successfully, now and then they must take a flight of fancy.”

– Multicultural Review

“An important chorus of our south of the border sisters for us Latinas to hear...Here we have much knowing and glorying from Argentina to Brazil to my own Dominican Republic—toes to waist to breasts of the hemisphere!” —Julia Alvarez

“A newly translated collection of flash fiction from Argentine writer Ana María Shua reveals to the English-speaking world that she is a major figure in this contemporary mode of writing.

Shua’s book Quick Fix is actually a collection of her best microfiction from four volumes she has written in this genre. Expertly selected, introduced, and translated by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, these stories draw on fairy tales, sexual fantasies, and dreams. What is most charming about Shua’s short shorts is that she presents situations that are completely fantastical, absurd, or paradoxical in a perfectly deadpan tone. Here is the entire text of a story called “For Lack of

Proof”:

“Enormous leaps, sixty or ninety feet high, in which I soar above the tree tops, and yet that’s all they are, leaps: the devastating proof that I can’t fly.”

In just one sentence, the mood swings from elation to deflation, but with a gentle, self-mocking humor that is one of Shua’s best qualities as a writer. Her work reminds me of the paintings of René Magritte,where absurdity is presented as a fact of life, but a hilarious one.

The four collections that the translator distilled to compile this book all have different themes. Dream Catcher, Shua’s first collection of sudden fiction, centers around sleeping and waking, though those are by no means the only topics. But Shua uses sleeping and dreaming as ways of

teasing out the paradoxes of the human condition. One very remarkable quality that emerges in this section of the book is Shua’s ability to step away from the earth, like an astronaut walking in space: “There exists in the world a man who is God, although he doesn’t realize it.…His desires, his fantasies, his most abstract intentions are carried out in a seemingly random manner that is subject to mysterious, albeit natural laws. For example, his gastric secretions provoke rivers of lava somewhere on the planet and his bad moods unleash wars.” As comical as this passage sounds, it is not that different from the idea of a god or a messiah walking on earth, an idea that many have faith in. There are certainly satirical edges to Shua’s Fabergé eggs of fantasy.

The second section of the book, “Geisha House,” focuses on sexual fantasy and obsession. With surprising humor, Shua shows the Möbius striptease that sometimes results from following desires to their logical, absurd conclusion: “Many prefer to be bound, and naturally, the kind of  bondage varies depending on the resources of the aroused victim: from silk ties to blood ties.” This section also contains variations on fairy tales and Jewish folklore about the golem, and these

are some of the funniest and most pointed of the sudden fictions.

The third section, “Botany of Chaos,” contains little meditations, one paragraph long, Shua’s favorite length for her short short fictions. They are more general than some of the others, but no less resonant.

The last section, “Ghost Season,” contains somewhat more elaborate fictions, some of which are laugh-out-loud funny, and other of which seem slightly off the mark. And that is one of the rewards and pitfalls of this genre—like a joke, the punch line of a nanofiction either works or it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, the whole exercise seems a bit flat, but when it hits home, it just sparkles. In the hands of a lesser translator, this collection could have lacked the pizzazz of the

Spanish, but in the English version of Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, the translator preserves the wry humor that is Shua’s ace.

The book has both the Spanish and the English, for which I bow down to the publisher of White Pine Press, Dennis Maloney, who has included this volume in his excellent Secret Weavers Series of Latin American women writers. 

The book is profusely illustrated with line drawings by the artist LuciMistratov. The decision to include many drawings is wise, particularly since these pieces take some thinking, and breaking up the text with illustrations allows the reader time to contemplate each short short before moving on to the next. 

All in all, Quick Fix establishes Ana María Shua as a major figure for English-language readers to follow in Latin American literature. The book makes me hope that many more of Shua’s fifty volumes of novels, short stories, poetry, theater, children’s fiction, humor, and folklore will soon appear in translation.”

—  Zack Rogow - Words Without Borders 

“Flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, blasters or, in Spanish, brevísimos: no matter what name one calls it, short short stories are an increasingly popular—and increasingly vital—literary

form.Despite their brevity, these stories require not only focus and agility on the part of the

reader, but also an author with a comedian’s sense of timing and a surgeon’s precision.  As the author of four collections of short short stories, La sueñera (Dream Catcher), Casa de geishas (Geisha House), Botánica del caos (Botany of Chaos) and Temporada de fantasmasGhost Season), Shua has had much practice in honing her art. And the punches she throws in Quick

Fix are deft, decisive and, presumably, the hardest in her oeuvre. The stories Shua tells are funny, whimsical, terrifying, off-beat and illustrative of the often complex and contradictory human condition. An equally strong complement to Shua’s prose (faithfully translated by Buchanan) is Luci Mistratov’s whimsically surreal llustrations, which accompany a surprisingly large number of the stories in Quick Fix. Equal parts cartoonish and spooky, Mistratov flawlessly captures the spirit of Shua’s writing, and her illustrations add depth and wonder to an already deep and wonderful book.

Quick Fix is an excellent primer to Shua’s work that will hopefully convince the uninitiated author to locate and read all of her short short story collections. It is highly recommended not only to aficionados of Argentine literature and readers with little time on their hands, but to readers who enjoy the strange and the silly. And, of course, readers curious to see how the precision of poetry can be translated into prose.”

—JoSelle Vanderhooft  - Pedestal Magazine

“The wink of an eye and we are transported to an unexpected realm. In very few impeccable lines, Ana María Shua's micro short stories open new vistas to our peception of dreams, myths, fairy tales, even of our everyday life. To read her is to discover another dimension in fiction: small is absolutely beautiful, and thrilling, and often disquieting. Rhonda Dahl Buchanan's translations open Shua's world to readers of English. ” -Luisa Valenzuela “These memorable pieces by Ana María Shua are here brought into English by way of Rhonda Dahl Buchanan's excellent translations, and enhanced by the line drawings of Luci Mistratov. Shua's devotion to the short short is amply illustrated in QUICK FIX. Sensual, pithy, instructive, thought-provoking, these shorts evoke the fluidity of poetry and the density of longer narrative forms. A toast to this international effort!” -- Margaret Sayers Peden “Ana Maria Shua is one of Argentina most gifted writers.This new collection beautifully translated by Rhonda Buchanan allows us to read Shua with elegance and enter into her whismical magical and marvelous world of imagination and Laughter. An essential contribution to Latin American letters.” -Marjorie Agosin

“Endearingly poetic… Muratore makes for an intriguing feminist heroine.”

–Publishers Weekly

[An] engaging narrative… [Demitropulos] captures well the historical, cultural, and geographical idiosyncrasies of… the earliest Spanish settlements [in Argentina].

–Multicultural Review

“Libertad Demitropulos’s novel of romance, jealousy, and unrequited love, set in sixteenth-century Argentina, is… a brilliant exploration of the emergence of a new Latin American identity in the early colonial period… River of Sorrows… is an original and engaging work, an historical novel that gives voice to the voiceless men and women who helped found a new people.”

–Américas 

In this astonishing range of work from the turn of the century to the present, we see the common threads of courage and inventiveness woven into a tapestry of voices that presents a true picture of a culture that must create its own history. The more than fifty poets include both well-known, such as Gabriela Mistral, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Alfonsina Storni, and lesser known, emerging writers.

This reprint of a White Pine Press classic brings together an astonishing range of work from the turn of the century to the present. Despite cultural maxims encouraging them to be silent, women continue to speak, often through the language of poetry, where there is an abundance of intuition and the possibility of reclaiming power through language. In the work included here, we see how the common threads of courage and inventiveness can be woven into a bright tapestry of women’s voices that presents a true picture of a culture that must create its own history. Over
fifty poets, including those well-known, such as Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, and Cristina Peri Rossi, and those just emerging are included.

Marjorie Agosin, editor of the Secret Weavers series, is well-known as a poet, writer, and human rights activist. She is a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

“The photographs and poems are a powerful collaboration, revealing a sensitive and arresting portrait of the landscape and people of Cuba..”

—Susan Freiband - Multicultural Review

Born in Cuba in 1902, Loynaz had established her reputation as a poet by the time of the Cuban revolution in 1959. Following the revolution, she, like a Cuban Emily Dickinson, retreated to her elegant and beloved home, vowing to never write poetry again, nor to ever leave the island of her birth--although she had the means to do so. She lived out the rest of her life in voluntary seclusion. Loynaz received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1992, the most prestigious award given to a writer in Spanish. She died in 1997. A Woman in Her Garden presents a bilingual selection of work from all phases of her career. Judith Kerman is professor of humanities at Saginaw Valley State College in Michigan. Her books of poetry include Mothering and The Jacoba Poems.

Most of these essays on women were originally published in newspapers and journals. Gathered together in Engish for the first time, they paint vivid portraits of some of the most extraordinary women of Mistral’s generation and give us an insight into Gabriela Mistral herself. Exquisite word portraits of women by one of the past century's greatest women writers. These recados, brief, descriptive essays,paint vivid pictures of some of the most extraordinary women of Mistral's generation and give us insights into Mistral herself. In these pieces, Mistral infuses the traditionally objective essay form with the intimate and subjective, thereby creating an alternate space for women intellectuals in the public sphere. Her subjects range from her own beloved mother to well-known writers such as Victoria Ocampo and Emily Bronte, artists such as Chilean sculptor Laura Rodig and dancer Isadora Duncan, and to topics including feminism, women and
politics, and women and education.

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is the only woman from Latin America to win the Nobel Prize. A native of Chile, she spent the final years of her life in the United States.