Fire from the Andes
Fire from the Andes
Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru
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 Mónica Bravo’s heroine attempting to outwit death, or the mayor’s wife, in a story by Alicia Yánez Cossío, 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.
Susan Benner is an instructor of English and linguistics at Iowa State University and an Iowa Art Fellow in the Master of Fine Arts in translation program at the University of Iowa. Kathy Leonard is professor of Spanish and Hispanic linguistics at Iowa State University, Ames, and was a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Bolivia. She was awarded an NEH grant for 2003 to translate the Bolivian novel Bajo el oscuro sol by Yolanda Bedregal.
