Beryl Bainbridge needs no introduction as one of the finest novelists of our times. But few people know that painting and drawing were also lifelong passions, which she found relaxing and altogether less pressurized than writing.
There are more than 1200 entires in all, from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Zarathustra; every relevant subject is treated, from Classical and Icelandic folklore to Chinese etiquette and the heresies of Gnosticism. Textual references are to the English and American versions and also to the Spanish originals. Dr Fishburn and Dr Hughes, both specialists in Borgesian studies, have produced an admirably concise work of reference which makes accessible to the general reader the imaginative world of one of the most challenging writers of the modern age.
Forbidden love was a forbidden topic. Decorum was everything–in society, where Catholicism dictated the terms, and in literature, where a code of decency governed writers and readers alike. To women were left the pale love stories that conducted appropriate partners in proper settings to socially acceptable outcomes. So it was in Latin America well into the twentieth century. The stories in this volume announce a dramatic change, a transformation of the literature of love in Latin America, and of the role–even the nature–of women in this most “feminine” literary tradition. These stories, by exciting new writers as well as by the renowned, are “violations” of the most exhilarating sort, flouting conventions of language, behavior, subject matter, and style to remake and widen our once-narrow view of the literary landscape of Latin America. Here women writers from Mexico and Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, Cuba, Peru, and Uruguay break social, religious, political, and sexual barriers in fiction that is by turns erotic, satirical, shocking, tragic–and always, in its remapping of literary boundaries, deeply and richly entertaining.
