Synopses & Reviews
In these short, bilingual stories set in Buenos Aires (with each piece appearing in Spanish and English on facing pages), Alicia Borinsky provides unique glimpses into the lives of the city's inhabitants: its businessmen and tango dancers, politicians and torturers, triumphant divas and discarded children—a gallery of characters from a broad spectrum of contemporary Argentine society. She portrays a world of violence, corruption, love, and betrayal. The brevity of the pieces suggests a breathlessness and ephemeral quality, the fast-paced rhythm of the present. Yet within these small moments flicker the larger forces that shape ordinary lives. Civil wars are fought, shady deals are made, unwanted children are born. And in Borinsky's ironic but life-affirming prose, human foibles are exposed. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
Review
“No one working today writes like Alicia Borinsky, whose words explode off the page. The voices in her work arise organically, and their accents and articulations, textures and quirks, are integral, authentic. Each of the voices (and there are scores) has its own palpable history; we feel it, even when its detailed particulars are withheld.”—Marguerite Feitlowitz, Bennington College, Vermont, author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture
About the Author
Born in Buenos Aires, novelist, poet, and literary critic Alicia Borinsky is professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University. In 1996 she received the Latino Literature Award for her novel
Sueños del seductor abandonado (translated into English in 1998 as
Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer). Her other fiction includes
Mina Cruel (1989, translated into English in 1993 as
Mean Woman)
, and
Cine continuado (1997, translated into English in 2002 as
All Night Movie).
Translator Cola Franzen, with whom Borinsky collaborated on this translation, has won various awards for her work, most recently the 2004 PEN Literary Award and the Gregory Kolovakos Award. She has translated several of Borinsky’s works.