This collection brings together 53 stories that span the history of Latin American literature and represent the most dazzling achievements in the form. It covers the entire history of Latin American short fiction, from the colonial period to present.

It includes introductions to the life and work of female authors who are not very well known in the Anglophone world due to the lack of translations of their works. This critical work with a feminist focus will provide a helpful framework for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the UK and US. A wide-ranging bibliography will be of great assistance to those looking to pursue research on the fantastic or on any of the specific writers and texts. This book is endorsed by the British Academy as part of the project Gender and the Fantastic in Hispanic Studies, and by an established international network, namely the Grupo de Estudios sobre lo Fantástico, based in the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.

Provides a grouping of Spanish-American short stories written by women, emphasizing their differences as much as their similarities. Bombal's La historia de Maria Griselda delves into the family tensions found in a country house in southern Chile. Somers' mordant, black humour is present in El derrumbiento, and Leccion de cocina is a humorous but pessimistic account of the profound changes that marriage demands from the Mexican middle-class woman.

This work deals with selected Latin-American writers of short stories and, in the case of each author, with only one or a limited number of texts. No attempt has been made to write a history of the contemporary short story in Latin America or even to deal with a canon of representative authors. Each of the texts studied has been chosen because it is indicative of a facet of the short story that parallels the so-called Latin American new novel.

This collection offers a rich sampling of the finest Mexican prose published from 1843 to 1918. Nine short stories appear in their original Spanish text, with expert English translations on each facing page.

This Very Short Introduction chronicles the trends and traditions of modern Latin American literature, arguing that Latin American literature developed as a continent-wide phenomenon, not just an assemblage of national literatures, in moments of political crisis. With the Spanish American War came Modernismo, the end of World War I and the Mexican Revolution produced the avant-garde, and the Cuban Revolution sparked a movement in the novel that came to be known as the Boom. Within this narrative, the author covers all of the major writers of Latin American literature, from Andr?s Bello and Jos? Mar?a de Heredia, through Borges and Garc?a M?rquez, to Fernando Vallejo and Roberto Bola?o.