Fire from the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru - Paperback

by Susan E. Benner (Author), Kathy S. Leonard (Editor), Marjorie Agosín (Foreword by)

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 Cossí-o, 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.

Front Jacket

South American women authors look at the female experience.

Author Biography

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.

Marjorie Agosín is the Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. She is the award-winning author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. Her works include I Lived on Butterfly Hill, The Maps of Memory: Return to Butterfly Hill, Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean Jewish Father, and Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez.