Best of
Latin-American-Literature

2010

Como Agua Para Chocolate: The Novel and Film Version


Nathanial Gardner - 2010
    This author's narrative, seeped in magic and peppered with Mexico's culinary customs, was quickly taken to the silver screen where Tita and Pedro's forbidden relationship would captivate audiences not only in its native country, but around the globe - cementing Equivel's name within the ever-growing canon of Latin American women writers. Nathanial Gardner introduces the reader to both the novel and the film version of Como agua para chocolate and examines not only key themes, such as rebellion and tradition, but also its style and main characters. This narrative's acclaimed use of food and other gastronomic elements are taken into consideration as well as the significance of magic realism to this text. As this novel/film combination follow each other in an unusually close manner, the first part analyses many of the components the two share while the second part of this study emphasizes the cinematic mechanisms that are unique to this particular presentation of Esquivel's most widely-studied creation to date.

The Return


Roberto Bolaño - 2010
    Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolano story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot—and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolano’s own).Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bolano’s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.

Correr el tupido velo


Pilar Donoso - 2010
    It is also a biography of his family, based upon the private diaries that he and his wife each wrote throughout their long married life. Pilar, his daughter, makes a detailed comparison of these diaries and provides her own memories, shedding light on how and why Donosos literary work developed.

Mundo Cruel: Stories


Luis Negrón - 2010
    The writing straddles the shifting line between pure, unadorned storytelling and satire, exploring the sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking nature of survival in a decidedly cruel world.

Selected Poems


Alejandra Pizarnik - 2010
    Rossi’s assured and highly-skilled versions, which have already won awards in both the John Dryden and the Stephen Spender Prizes for translation, now look set to bring Pizarnik’s work to a wider audience, capturing the poems’ otherworldliness and mysticism.