Microfictions

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Microfictions

Ana María Shua
Translated by Steven J. Stewart

Latin American Women Writers Series

210 pages

Paperback

April 2009

978-0-8032-2090-4

$19.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)

(Requires Adobe Digital Editions)

April 2009

978-0-8032-2091-1

$19.95 Add to Cart
about author bio praise table of contents media awards

About the Book

Cinderella’s sisters surgically modify their feet to win the prince’s love. A werewolf gathers up enough courage to visit a dentist. A medium trying to reach the afterworld gets a recorded message. A fox and a badger compete to out-fool each other. Whether writing of insomnia from a mosquito’s point of view or showing us what happens after the princess kisses the frog, Ana María Shua, in these fleet and incandescent stories, is nothing if not pithy—except, of course, wildly entertaining. Some as short as a sentence, these microfictions have been selected and translated from four different books. Flashes of insight, cracks of wit, twists of logic, and quirks of language: these are fictions in the distinguished Argentinean tradition of Borges and Cortázar and Denevi, as powerful as they are brief.
 
One of Argentina’s most prolific and distinguished writers, and acclaimed worldwide, Shua displays in these microfictions the epitome of her humor, riddling logic, and mastery over our imagination. Now, for the first time in English, the fox transforms itself into a fable, and “the reader is invited to find the tail.”

Author Bio

Ana María Shua has published more than forty books in many genres, including poetry, children’s fiction, novels, and books on Jewish folklore, and her work has been translated into many languages. She lives in Buenos Aires.

Steven J. Stewart is an associate professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University–Idaho in Rexburg. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship for Translation by the National Endowment for the Arts. His translation of Devoured by the Moon: Selected Poems of Rafael Perez Estrada was a finalist for the PEN USA Translation Award.

Praise



"Argentinean poet Shua is a master of the bon mot. Each of these concise, lyrical pieces—somewhere between aphorism, anecdote and poem, and rarely longer than a paragraph—contains a fluid, perplexing, and (often) highly amusing thought. . . . These dreamlike landscapes will delight and charm readers new to Shua’s work."—Publishers Weekly

"This is a very enjoyable collection, and the best pieces impress mightily; certainly one is left hungry for more of these morsels. Well worthwhile."—M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review

"Moving from the familiar to the strange in simple sentences, and somehow finding the worlds within our world this collection of stories bewilders and delights all at once. . . . An intriguing genre, it reeks of freshness and should be explored."—2009 MOSAIC

"Treat the various stories like abstract art, rather than typical works of English. They are most enjoyable after rolling around in one's mind for a time. They are exquisite to ponder. They have subtle meanings and messages that can be searched for."—Clinton Borror, Big Muddy

“The microfictions of Ana María Shua unfurl an absurd and ingenious world like that of Lewis Carroll. . . . What great literature breathes in these pages!”—A B C (Madrid)

“Argentinean Ana María Shua is one of the best creators of the microstory genre. An ingenious and absurd world in which pulsates the best literature.”—El País (Madrid)

“Shua’s microfictions are paradigms of wicked humor. The author shows herself capable repeatedly of zeroing in on a detail—perverse, quirky, often appalling—of the unstable reality of human experience and revealing it to be the essence of ordinary daily existence.”—David William Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women & Gender Studies at Arizona State University, and editor of Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  

1. Monsters

2. Dreams  

3. Magic   

4. Health  

5. Literature    

6. Men and Women 

7. Faith   

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JEWels

Edited by Steve Zeitlin
Lead commentary by Peninnah Schram

With commentaries by
Robert Bernstein, Esther Cohen, Lisa Lipkin, Bob Mankoff,
Flash Rosenberg, Jack Santino, Rabbi Edward Schecter, and Zev Shanken

With contributions by
Dennis J. Bernstein, Robert Bernstein, Roslyn Bresnick-Perry, Esther Cohen, Sylvia Cole, Rachel Ray Faust, Robert Hershon, Bob Holman, Rabbi David Holtz, David Ignatow, Marc Kaminsky, Cherie Karo-Schwartz, Mayer Kirshenblatt, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Carol Klenfner, Jack Kugelmass, Annie Lanzillotto, Warren Lehrer, Philip Levine, Lisa Lipkin, Bob Mankoff, Linda Pastan, Flash Rosenberg, Jack Santino, Rabbi Edward Schecter, Peninnah Schram, Renée Fodor Schwarz, Hal Sirowitz, Zev Shanken, Mark Solomon, Sparrow, Arthur Strimling, Marc Wallace, Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg, Francine Witte, Lila Zeiger, Aaron Zeitlin, and others