Ken, the publisher, here. I couldn't be more thrilled to make this book flesh. This collection of aphorisms concise, eloquent truths contains so much poetry and passion and deep thinking, I've been caught by single pages for hours. This book is sharp, funny, tragic, irreverent, wise. All beauty. It puts fire in me. I invite you to enjoy that fire, too."

    “The Youngest Doll,” based on a family anecdote, is a stunning literary expression of Rosario Ferré’s feminist and social concerns. It is the premier story in a collection that was originally published in Spanish in 1976 as Papeles de Pandora and is now translated into English by the author. The daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico, Ferré portrays women loosening the constraints that have bound them to a patriarchal culture. Anger takes creative rather than polemical form in ten stories that started Ferré on her way to becoming a leading woman writer in Latin America. The upper-middle-class women in The Youngest Doll, mostly married to macho men, rebel against their doll-like existence or retreat into fantasy, those without money or the right skin color are even more oppressed. In terms of power and influence, these women stand in the same relation to men as Puerto Rico itself does to the United States, and Ferré stretches artistic boundaries in writing about their situation. The stories, moving from the realistic to the nightmarish, are deeply, felt, full of irony and black humor, often experimental in form. The imagery is striking: an architect dreams about a beautiful bridge that “would open and close its arches like alligators making love”; a Mercedes Benz “shines in the dark like a chromium rhinoceros.” One story, “The Sleeping Beauty,” is a collage of letters, announcements, and photo captions that allows chilling conclusions to be drawn from what is not written. The collection includes Ferré’s discussion of “When Women Love Men,” a story about a prostitute and a society lady who unite in order to survive, and one that illustrates the woman writer’s “art of dissembling anger through irony.” In closing, she considers how her experience as a Latin American woman with ties to the United States has brought to her writing a dual cultural perspective.

    He saw the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grimness of social conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the Indians who are a part of it. Ernesto, the narrator of Deep Rivers, is a child with origins in two worlds. The son of a wandering country lawyer, he is brought up by Indian servants until he enters a Catholic boarding school at age 14. In this urban Spanish environment he is a misfit and a loner. The conflict of the Indian and the Spanish cultures is acted out within him as it was in the life of Arguedas. For the boy Ernesto, salvation is his world of dreams and memories. While Arguedas' poetry was published in Quechua, he invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary. This makes translation into other languages extremely difficult, and Frances Horning Barraclough has done a masterful job, winning the 1978 Translation Center Award from Columbia University for her efforts.