Fire from the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru

By: Benner, Susan E.

Book Overview

This anthology provides an opportunity for English-speaking audiences to read previously untranslated fiction by women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Much of this work is inspired by an awareness of social injustice--particularly for women, indigenous groups, and other marginalized members of society and by a desire to transcend that injustice through personal revelation. Most of the stories focus on women's inner lives and their struggles to make sense of experience.

Like M nica Bravo's heroine attempting to outwit death, or the mayor's wife, in a story by Alicia Y nez Coss -o, surviving the news of her husband's infidelity, many of the protagonists are strong women, wise and shrewd. Perhaps the same could be said of the twenty-four authors who have drawn from their experience and imagination to create these compelling, often haunting, stories of life, liberty, love, and loss.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826318258
• ISBN13: 9780826318251
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Passion

"Fire from the Andes" is a collection of short stories written by women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Latin American literature has few prominent female authors and these three Andean countries have even fewer women writers. Having spent several months in all three of these countries, I can attest to the passion for life shared by this part of the world. This passion is reflected in these women's short stories, albeit sometimes painful and disappointing. Although these are fiction, the lives the women describe are common in these beautiful, magical, amazing countries.