Prospero's Mirror: A Translators' Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction

The wide range of styles on display in Prospero's Mirror showcases the talents of both the writers included and the translators who have worked their alchemistical magic on these stories, written originally in Spanish. These stories exhibit the preoccupations and themes universal in Latin American literature: Luisa Valenzuela's "The Place of Its Solitude," for example, reports on an imaginary country from which people mysteriously disappear, where the campesinos are separated mentally and spiritually from the city dwellers, and where no one dares to speak their mind. In Alfonso Reyes's "The Dinner," the narrator relates his Kafka-esque experience of dining with two women whom he had never met before their alarming invitation came. The evening, like an eerie dream, haunts and puzzles him as he races home to find the last symbol of a dinner that may never have happened at all. In "Game of Shadows" by Ruben Loza Aguerreberre, a writer is lured into a relationship with Anna, a mysterious woman who tells him, "Women guide, and men follow." He later realizes the true implications of her words--and begins to tell his story--when he discovers that he has helped Anna to kill her husband.