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.
Psiche Hughes lectures at London University and at City Literary College. She is the coauthor of the definitive Dictionary of Borges and the translator of works by Cristina Peri Rossi and Carmen Boullosa.
Brian Matthews is Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Europe-Australia Institute at Victoria University in Melbourne. He is the author of Louisa, A Fine and Private Place, and Quickening and Other Stories. His numerous awards include the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society.
