The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945

Sábato, Ernesto [Biography] Argentine novelist and essayist, he is a major intellectual figure of the post-WWII period in Latin America. He was born in Rojas (province of Buenos Aires) in 1911 and went to the city of La Plata in southern Argentina in 1924 for his high school studies; he remained in La Plata for his undergraduate education in physics and mathematics. With the military coup in Argentina in 1930, Sábato became increasingly politicized and joined the Communist Party, although he later became skeptical of most mainline ideologies and political parties and left the Communist Party. In 1934 he attended an anti-Fascist conference in Brussels and visited Paris from there. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1936, marrying the woman who would remain his wife for the rest of his life, and began graduate studies in physics, completing his doctorate in 1937. With a scholarship for postdoctoral study in Paris in 1938, he met French surrealist André Breton and other European writers of the avant-garde. After studies at MIT in the United States, he returned to Buenos Aires in 1940 and became involved in the literary world of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Victoria Ocampo, publishing essays in the prestigious magazine Sur and the cultural supplement of the newspaper La Nación. In 1943, suffering from an existential crisis, he left the discipline of science and began writing the literary-philosophical essay Uno y el universo (One and the universe), which he published in 1945. In 1948 he published his first novel, El túnel, which appeared in English in 1950 as The Outsider with a French version the following year. It is a novel of love, jealousy, and murder, but the thematic focus is the protagonist’s alienation. He published a book of essays, Heterodoxia, in 1953. After holding several government positions in the cultural sphere, he wrote his major novel, Sobre heroes y tumbas (1961, On Heroes and Tombs). For the early part of the novel, it is the story of two characters, then focusing on a third character, Fernando Vidal, whom many readers consider the protagonist. It is a lengthy and complex work that is best understood as an examination of values and an effort to reconsider human beings as individuals in contemporary society. The first volume of his Obras completas (Complete works) appeared in 1966, and the second volume in 1970. He received several prizes in Argentina, among them the Gran Premio de Honor de la Sociedad Argentina, for his novel Abaddón, el exterminador (1974, The Angel of Darkness), his most enigmatic and provocative work. In 1981 Seix Barral, in Spain, published his Narrativa completa (Complete narrative). He was active in the political process in Argentina after the military dictatorship in the 1980s and was involved with the evaluation of the military legacy.

Sabino, Fernando Tavares [Biography] Brazilian novelist and journalist, he was born in Belo Horizonte (state of Minas Gerais) in 1923. He was a voratious reader of literature as a child, a period when he read everything from Portuguese classics to detective novels. He was also a competitive swimmer. After holding several government positions, he began publishing journalism in the 1940s. He began publishing fiction in the 1950s.

He has published over forty books of fiction, crônicas, travel books, and children’s literature, and his work has been included in an anthology of the nation’s one hundred best short stories. He has also worked as a journalist in several important venues in Brazil, including the Fohla de São Paulo. Serving in the diplomatic corps in New York and London in the 1950s and 1960s, he became well-known among Brazilian readers as the author of crônicas—short and light vignettes of urban life. His novel O Encontro Marcado (1956, The appointment) harks back to the Vargas dictatorship of the 1930s and 1940s, and tells the story of an alienated boy’s spiritual search for meaning in life.

Sada, Daniel [Biography] Mexican novelist, short story writer, and poet, he was born in Mexicali (state of Baja California del Norte) in 1953. After beginning his writing career as a poet, and short story writer, he has become one of the most prominent novelists of his generation with stories of minimal survival in Mexico, conflict, and black humor. His novel Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1996, Because it seems like a lie the truth is never known) is a political intrigue dealing with the potential for truth in Mexican politics. Fraudulent elections and a protest against them are the basis of this novel’s plot, which is not centered on one protagonist but on a group of characters all somehow related to each other by blood, political affiliation, or the workplace. Most of them have suffered a death or disappearance of someone close to them. The reader places together the events and relationships as they appear in a series of fragments, often written in a telegraphic style and not lacking in humor. At the end the characters abandon the town of Remadrín, and all that remains are rumors. His recent Luces artificiales (2002, Artificial lights) is an urban chronicle survival with Sada’s trademark black humor.

Saer, Juan José [Biography] Argentina novelist, short story writer, and essayist born in Serodino (province of Santa Fe) in 1937, he has become one of the most productive and widely read novelists of his generation in his homeland and increasingly known throughout Latin America. He was a professor at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, where he taught film and film criticism. His literary essays include the books El río sin orillas (1991, River without banks), an antiliterary polemic, and later came forth with El concepto de ficción (1997, The concept of fiction) and La narración-objeto (1999, Narrative-object), the latter a group of essays on writers such as Cervantes, Faulkner, and Borges. He began publishing fiction in the early 1960s with the volume of short stories En la zona (1960, In the zone); his total fiction includes four volumes of short stories and eleven novels. In 1986 he received the Nadal Prize in Spain for his novel La ocasión (1986, The Event). His one book of poetry is titled, paradoxically, El arte de narrar (1977, The art of narrating).

Sainz, Gustavo [Biography] Mexican novelist, screenwriter, short story writer, and essayist, he was born in Mexico City in 1940. He studied law and then literature at the National University in Mexico City (UNAM). Sainz and José Agustín are best known in Mexico and Latin America as the central figures of the Onda, a countercultural rebellion against the established norms of both the traditional and modern cultures of Mexico. Inspired by the work of J. D. Salinger, the American Beats, and rock music, they produced a fiction in tune with youth culture and the colloquial language of 1960s Mexico. In many ways this fiction was in dialogue with international postmodern fiction. Sainz’s first novel, Gazapo (1965), was the first work of the Onda and has remained the signature novel of this movement. His second novel of this type was Obsesivos días circulares (1969, Obsessive circular days). Sainz began writing against the Onda with Compadre lobo (1977, Friend wolf), Ojalá te mueras y otras novelas clandestinas mexicanas (1982, I hope you die and other clandestine Mexican novels), and Fantasmas aztecas (1982, Aztec phantoms).

Salazar Bondy, Sebastián [Biography] Peruvian novelist and short story writer, he was born in 1924 and died in 1965. His publications in fiction were sparse, but he commanded the respect of his readership in Peru, including such prominent novelists as Mario Vargas Llosa. He published the volume of short stories Náufragos y sobrevivientes (1954, Shipwrecks and survivors). His posthumous novel Alférez Arce, Teniente Arce, Capitán Arce (1969, Ensign Arce, Lieutenant Arce, Captain Arce) describes the inner life of a political prisoner.

Sales, Herberto [Biography] Born in Andaraí (state of Bahia) in 1917 in Brazil, he has written detailed fictionalized descriptions of his native region, which is well-known for its diamond panners as well as the violence associated with such activities. He is a conventional realist and social critic who constructs linear plots and well-rounded characters. His first novel, Cascalho (1944), deals with the criminal activity and everyday life among the diamond hunters, and this novel gained Sales considerable notoriety in Brazil. His second novel, Além dos Marimbas (1961, Beyond the marimbas), is a travel narrative that offers the reader extravagant descriptions of the flora and fauna of the region of Matas de Andaraí in Brazil. In the process he tells the story of a man involved in the lumber industry. His work Einstein, o Minigênio (1983, Einstein the minigenius) is his satire of certain aspects of modernization, such as education in the computer age.

Salvador, Humberto [Biography] Ecuadorian novelist born in 1909, he was associated with that nation’s generation of 1930, a group committed to social and political reform. He was as committed to these ideals as his contemporaries, but more interested in portraying the psychological depth of his characters and the human relationships among them in such novels as La fuente clara (1946, The clear fountain), Silueta de una dama (1964, Silhouette of a lady), and Viaje a lo desconocido (1967, Voyage into the unknown).

Sánchez, Héctor [Biography] Colombian novelist, essayist, and short story writer, he became prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s as part of the generation that had a double task in Colombia; dealing with how to fictionalize the experience of the 1950s civil war called La Violencia and dealing with the shadow of celebrity writer Gabriel García Márquez. He was born in Guamo (department of Tolima), Colombia, in 1940. He began writing in the late 1960s and published his first volume of short stories, Cada viga en su ojo (Each branch in his eye) in 1967; he has published two other volumes of short fiction as well as a collection of essays and short fiction, Literatura y chantaje (1973). Sánchez and others who began writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s also became known in Colombia as the “Generation of the Blockade and the State of Siege” because of the blockade against Cuba and the numerous governmental crises in Colombia that caused the central government to regularly declare a state of siege, suspending many normal democratic processes and human rights protections. Sánchez earned a reputation with the publication of his prize-winning first novel, Las causas supremas (1969, The supreme causes), followed by Las maniobras (1969, The schemes), but then went to Barcelona for the better part of the 1970s and 1980s to write and pursue his literary career. In these two early novels, Sánchez presents characters who are frustrated in any attempt to participate in society and improve their lot. While in Barcelona Sánchez wrote Los desheredados (1974, The disinherited), Sin nada entre las manos (1976, Nothing in the hands), and El tejemaneje (1979, The operator).

Sánchez, Luis Rafael [Biography] Puerto Rican novelist, essayist, and playwright born in Humaco, Puerto Rico in 1936, he is the major contemporary novelist of that island. He began writing plays in the late 1950s and enjoyed his first major success in 1968 with his play La pasión según Antígona Pérez (The passion according to Antigone Perez). His early plays were existentialist in theme, and his later ones were lighter in tone, celebrating the entertainment value of language in itself. Sánchez has also published essays throughout his career, including La guagua aérea (1994, The aerial bus). He began publishing fiction in the late 1960s.

Sánchez, Néstor [Biography] Argentine novelist born in 1934, he became known as one of Argentina’s most radically experimental novelists in the late 1960s. He was much acclaimed for his early novel Siberia Blues (1968), one of the most audaciously experimental books to be published in Latin America.

Sánchez (Yoss), José Miguel [Biography] Caribbean novelist and short story writer, he was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1969. He is one of the few Latin American writers writing in Spanish, along with the Argentine Angélica Gorodischer, who is interested in science fiction. He studied biology and has received prizes in Cuba for both his short stories and novels, including a local prize for science fiction (David de Ciencia-Ficción) at the age of nineteen. His 1994 novel Jugando a rumiarse el tiempo (Playing at contemplating time) was a finalist for the Casa de las Américas Prize. He has published two volumes of science fiction short stories, Timshel (1990) and W (1997), as well as the novel Los pecios y los náufragos (2000, The fish and the shipwrecks).

Sant’Anna, Sérgio [Biography] Novelist, poet, and short story writer, he is known in Brazil as a satirist and experimentalist. He combines humor with critique and successfully juxtaposes formal language with the colloquial. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1941, he studied law before embarking on a career as a writer and becoming involved with Estórias, a magazine of experimental fiction (later closed down by the military regime in the 1960s). He was also associated with the literary supplement of a newspaper in Minas Gerais. His writing arose as part of the expression of a generation influenced by the Beat generation and 1960s counterculture in the United States, constantly challenging limits and conventions, and is easily associated with international postmodern fiction. After publishing his first volume of short stories, O sobrevivente (1969, The survivor), he participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His first novel, the parodic Confissões de Ralfo (uma autobiografía imaginária) (1975, Ralfo’s confessions), was remarkably successful in Brazil. Its wild adventures and experimental style hark back to inventive fictions as far ranging as Don Quijote to a Brazilian classic of the 1920s, Macunaíma; in fact, the book has been called an “anti-Don Quijote.” It is inspired as much by Jack Kerouac as by Cervantes, however, and the author explains in the prologue that the book treats the “real life of an imaginary man or the imaginary life of a real man.” A first-person account divided into nine books of thoughts and fantasies, this novel is only vaguely related to the genre of the novel. The antihero Ralfo undertakes a psychological voyage that is highly imaginative. On another level of reading, it is a subtle and subversive political work, with one section dealing with torture: the author uses humor to present violence. His novel Simulacros (1977, Simulacra) is a self-conscious metafiction that exhibits the crisis of the novelistic form as well as the crisis of middle-class values. Um Romance de Geração (1980, Generational novel), which the author calls a “dramatic comedy in one act,” is about a frustrated, alcoholic writer. Sant’Anna received a prestigious Brazilian literary prize (Prêmio Jabuti) for two of his texts, O Concerto de João Gilberto no Rio de Janeiro (1982, João Gilberto’s concert in Rio de Janeiro) and Amazônia (1986, Amazon), the latter a soap opera parody of the political establishment. His volume A Senhorita Simpson (1989, Ms. Simpson) can be read as a two-part novel or seven stories. The second part of the book consists of a novella titled “A senhorita Simpson (uma novela),” and tells the story of cultural and personal encounters between students of English in Copacabana. His recent short novel Um Crime Delicado (1997, A delicate crime) is a postmodern text with vague links to the spy thriller as well as to criticism and memoir. In 1997 he published a volume of his collected short stories and novellas, Contos e Novelas Reunidos (Stories and novels) with texts originally published from 1969 to 1990.

Santiago, Silviano [Biography] Brazilian novelist, poet, short story writer, and scholar, he holds a doctorate in French literature from the Sorbonne and is a leading exponent of postmodern fiction in Brazil as well as an outspoken critic of the military regime (1964–1989). He is also considered an authority in French literature. Born in Formiga (state of Minas Gerais) in 1936, he has taught in the United States, Canada, and Europe. His essays have appeared in volumes titled Uma literatura nos trópicos (1971, A literature in the tropics) and Vale quanto pesa (1982, You get what you pay for). He has established a well-earned reputation as an experimentalist both in fiction and his poetry. In 1970 he published a book of poems titled Salto (Jump). His novel O Olhar (1974, The look) deals with a mother-father-child triangle and is written in the mode of the French nouveau roman. He was awarded the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti in 1982 for his novel Em Liberdade: Uma Ficcão de Silviano Santiago (1981, At liberty: a fiction by Silviano Santiago). Narrated through the eyes of a fictionalized version of the Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, this novel questions the nature of personal liberty. Stella Manhattan (1985) is set in New York during the years of the military dictatorship in Brazil and deals with subjects such as exile, leftist guerrillas, and gender. His later novel Uma História de Família (1992, A family story) is an atypical family story, for it is a disturbing account of human relations: it consists of a series of ramblings by an unnamed narrator-character who makes frequent references to a silent interlocutor, Uncle Mário, who is the personification of misfortune. His antisocial, obsessive, and at times sadomasochistic behavior presents a fearful vision of domestic life.

Santos-Febres, Mayra [Biography] Puerto Rican novelist, short story writer poet, essayist, and academic, she was born in 1966. The child of teachers who grew up with asthma, she lived in a world of books from an early age and was writing as a child. In high school a mentor taught her several of the disciplines that support a writing career. She holds a PhD in literature from Cornell University. Santos-Febres writes about the experience of urban life in the Caribbean, and she is particularly interested in exploring ways to reproduce the subtle tones and rhythm of Caribbean popular language as it is used in music. She writes as a marginalized black woman, but does not consider marginality a fixed category: in some spheres of her life (for reasons associated with class and education) she considers herself more in the center than in the margins. She has also been involved with television, appearing as a poet in the show Grado Zero.

Sarduy, Severo [Biography] Cuban novelist, essayist, and poet, he was a leading innovator of his generation in Latin America and one of the most complex and hermetic writers of the Caribbean region. Influenced by French structuralism and poststructuralism, he is known as a theoretical, postmodern novelist and essayist who challenged many of the traditional and even modern tenets of Latin American culture and thought. He wrote at length about the “empty center,” and many critics considered his novels a parody of poststructuralist thought in general and deconstructionist theory in particular.

Sarduy was strongly committed to the revolution promoted by the government of Fidel Castro and began writing literary and political essays for a variety of new cultural organs in the early 1960s. He received a fellowship to study art criticism at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris in 1959, and in 1961 he decided to stay in Paris rather than return to Cuba. He continued studying art, wrote his first novel, Gestos (1963, Gestures), and eventually studied with French theorist Roland Barthes, bringing Sarduy into the group involved with the publication of the renowned French journal of literature and theory, Tel Quel. He worked closely with Barthes and renowned structuralist philosopher François Wahl. Under the influence of French structuralism, Sarduy reread a large number of Cuban literary texts. In addition to Gestos, he published a total of seven novels before his death in 1994. In his later Maitreya (1978), another bizarre plot leads the reader to understand that Sarduy’s real concern is how Western culture is destroying Eastern religions. In his last novel, Pájaros de la playa (1993, Beach birds), an island is populated by the aged and infirm, with multiple allusions to Latin American writing from the early twentieth century. The plot involves a conflict between competing healers, or curanderos, for the sick. Following the postmodern strategies of his earlier writing, Sarduy engages in an overt rewriting of the Latin American tradition. His essays made Sarduy a leading cultural critic of the 1970s and 1980s, and one of his most representative essays is available in English under the title Written on a Body (1989).

Sarduy’s major novels are Gestos (1963, Gestures), De donde son los cantantes (1967, Where the birds sing), and Cobra (1972). Sarduy is not transparent about his interests in history, but all three are historical works in the most abstract sense. Gestos was the author’s attempt to grasp “Cubanness,” to satirize the 1950s dictatorship of Batista in Cuba, and to relate the history of Cuba. A technically sophisticated work for its time, it was an experiment in using multiple voices. De donde son los cantantes contains three overlapping plots involving the Chinese, African, and white segments of the Cuban people. In the first plot a transvestite entertainer named Lotus Flower is pursued and murdered by a Spanish general; in the second an Afro-Cuban woman from a rural area marries a politician in Batista’s congress; the third reviews Cuban history, culminating in the trek of two white transvestites who carry a statue of Christ symbolic of Castro from Santiago to Havana. In Cobra a white transvestite who has undergone a sex-change operation becomes the star of a plush theater-brothel, an exceptional place that includes characters such as La Cadillac, Cobra’s double who has also undergone a sex-change operation. In accordance with the historic interests Sarduy shows in the first two novels, the third part of Cobra is a quote from Columbus’s diary, his voyage being seen as the first example of the Latin American (and perhaps Western) search for the mythic, utopian East as a resolution to the violent contradictions of Western civilization.

Sarduy died in Paris in 1993, succumbing to complications of AIDS at the age of fifty-five. A posthumous volume of poems and short prose pieces appeared in 1994 under the title Epitafios. Imitación. Aforismos (Epitaphs, imitations, aphorisms). Anticipating those who might write epitaphs after his own death, in this volume he wrote a jocular epitaph that reflected his playful view of life. He also evokes the religious tradition of Spain’s Golden Age, writing an imitation of the spiritual poetry of San Juan de la Cruz. In this and several other pieces in the collection, Sarduy wrote about the enigmas related to the presence or absence of God.

Schwarz-Bart, Simone [Biography] A leading writer of the French Caribbean, she was born in 1938 in France but grew up in Guadeloupe from age three. She has dedicated most of her writing to fiction and theater and authored the play Ton beau capitane (1987). With her novel Pluie et vent sur Telumée Miracle (1972, Between two worlds) she was soon recognized as one of the major women’s voices in the Caribbean. She writes in French, but her literary language reflects a sense of the French creole spoken in Guadeloupe. Her fiction deals with the colonial legacy in the Caribbean—slavery, the uneven distribution of wealth, and the breakdown of traditional family relationships. Her second novel, Ti-Jean L’horizon (1979, Your handsome captain), deals with similar issues in a more explicitly political manner.

Scliar, Moacyr [Biography] Brazilian novelist and short story writer, he has cultivated a set of fantastic fictions that have invited many readers and critics to compare him to the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges as well as the exponents of magical realism in Spanish America. A prolific writer, Scliar has published over thirty books of fiction. Born in Porto Alegre in 1937 of a Jewish Brazilian family, he is a descendent of a Russian Jewish family that came to Brazil in the early twentieth century; he has also been compared to international Jewish writers, primarily because of the particular type of humor apparent in much of his work and the fact that his writing fictionalizes the Jewish cultural legacy in Brazil. He received a medical degree in 1962 and since then has been a practicing doctor as well as writer. During the 1970s and the 1990s he published a journalistic column regularly in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.

Scliar entered the Brazilian literary scene with a volume of short stories, O Carnival dos Animais (1968, Carnival of the animals), and then began a long and distinguished career as a novelist with A Guerra do Bom Fim (1972, The war with a good ending), the story of a boy growing up in the Jewish sector of Porto Alegre. Most of his fiction since has underscored Jewish difference. His next novel, O Exército de Um Homen Só (1973, The One-Man Army) is the story of a Jewish real-estate agent in Porto Alegre who seems to be struck by madness and attempts to form a utopian society. The protagonist in Deuses de Raquel (1975, The Gods of Raquel) is a Jewish woman who immigrates to Porto Alegre. O Ciclo das Aguas (1976, The cycle of waters) deals with a Jewish street prostitute in Porto Alegre. O Centauro no Jardim (1980, The Centaur in the Garden) is the story of a Jewish centaur, and depicts Brazilian reality by means of myth and allegory. A Majestade do Xingu (1997, Xingu’s majesty) focuses on a Russian Jewish immigrant, a doctor who dedicates himself to working with indigenous groups; the novel reflects a broad range of race and class. Scliar’s deft handling of allegory and history are apparent in his later novel, Cenas da Vida Minúscula (1991, Scenes of minuscule life), which spans the biblical creation and King Solomon to the European Renaissance and a modern “1984” Brazil in which the protagonist, who is married and has several children, carries on secret affairs with a woman ten centimeters tall. In this novel the author satirizes Brazilian ideals of being “big” and “bigger” and draws upon the teachings of the Bible and the Kabbalah to emphasize, as the narrator-protagonist states, “small is beautiful.” This novel, like several of Scliar’s fictions, offers not only a critique of traditional machismo and authoritarianism but also a playful approach to feminism and different forms of consumerism.

Sea of Lentils by Antonio Benitez-Rojo (See Mar de lentejas) [Novel]

Selvon, Samuel [Biography] Caribbean novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and screenwriter, he was born on the island of Trinidad, then a British colony, in 1923. Selvon grew up on the island’s second-largest city, San Fernando, as part of its middle class: his father was a dry goods merchant who had immigrated from India and his mother was half Scottish and half Amerindian. Selvon claims to have grown up completely Westernized, even though many Indians choose to live in Trinidad practicing the customs and religions of India. He served in the British navy during WWII and worked as a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian. As a youthful journalist, he also began writing short stories and poems. His early work was heard throughout the British Empire on a Caribbean Voices program of the BBC in the 1950s. Selvon immigrated to Great Britain in 1950 and published his first novel, A Brighter Sun, in 1952.

Selvon is best known for his early novels A Brighter Sun (1952), and its sequel, Turn Again Tiger (1958), as well as his London trilogy The Lonely Londoners (1958), Moses Ascending (1975), and Moses Migrating (1983). A Brighter Sun is the novel of a quest: the protagonist, Tiger, is an Indian youngster who searches for identity in colonial society, supporting a wife as a newlywed. His search leads him to an increasingly macabre understanding of his role, even to a special kind of wisdom gained through experience, as well as a new social and political awareness. Tiger’s need to better understand himself and the social world continues in Turn Again Tiger. In The Lonely Londoners Selvon uses a Caribbean creole as the narrative voice, and the strategies of oral storytelling are central to the novel’s construction; several critics have associated its episodic structure to both the carnival and to calypso music. This novel and the later Moses Ascending are chronicles of the immigrant experience of Trinidadians in London. The main theme of the three novels set in London is cultural assimilation. Selvon adopts a satiric attitude toward narratives that celebrate the symbiotic relationship between Caribbean (West Indian) culture and European (British) culture. This satire implies a critique of many basic assumptions about the relationship between developing and developed nations.

Señor Presidente, El (1946, The President, by Miguel Angel Asturias. Translation by Francis Partridge, 1978) [Novel] A classic dictator novel by the Nobel laureate of Guatemala, it is based on the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera from 1898 to 1920. Asturias began a short story, “Los mendigos” (The beggars), in Guatemala in 1922 and continued its development as a novel in Paris in the 1930s. A pioneer novel at the time, it is an anthology of modernist narrative techniques, with fragmention, interior monologue, neologisms, and the like. Many readers have pointed out an anomaly: the dictator is omnipresent yet does not actually appear as a character. This physical invisibility is typical of many Latin American dictators (and dictator novels). The novel’s opening scene is on a street populated with beggars and Pelele, an idiot, who kills Colonel Parrales Sonriente, a key officer for the dictator. The dictator uses this death as an excuse to assassinate General Eusebio Canales and the lawyer Miguel de Carvajal. The central character is Cara de Angel, an encarnation of evil. Asturias uses other characters to represent the forces of good and evil and incorporates numerous elements of Mayan mythology into the work. He presents ongoing scenarios that underscore human depravity. In the end, however, he also offers hope in the characters of the young Miguel as well as other affirmations of human values.

Sepúlveda, Luis [Biography] Chilean novelist, he has gained a broad international readership in the Hispanic world with best sellers such as Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (1992, An old man who read love stories), which was translated into fourteen languages. His novel Hot Line (2002) is a detective story. In a prologue to this work, the author claims that, on a trip to the Aysén fjord in Patagonia, a Mapuche Indian told him the story which he originally published in the style of nineteenth-century journalism called the folletín. Most scholars and critics in Latin America consider him a commercial writer.

Serna, Enrique [Biography] Mexican novelist, essayist, and short story writer, he has become increasingly visible on the Mexican literary scene since the late 1990s. His novel El seductor de la patria (1999, Seductor of the fatherland) was highly circulated and commented upon in Mexico. It is a historical novel that tells the story of a controversial nineteenth-century figure, Santa Anna (Antonio López de Santa Anna, commonly known as “Santa Anna,” 1794–1986), from his youth in Xalapa to his death in Mexico City. A novel of historical research, it is written using the epistolary tradition in fiction, with letters from a series of historical figures and versions of events and motives that contradict each other. In this fictionalized biography, his son of eighty years of age uses memory and a series of letters to relate his father’s fictitious life. Born into a conservative Catholic family in Mexico, Santa Anna joined the army at the age of sixteen and worked his way up the military hierarchy. Always motivated by the desire to control and exercise power, in this novel Santa Anna eventually becomes a pathetic figure. Serna shows him as a person willing to sell his family’s properties and lose the confidence of the townspeople to promote his career. Serna weaves a complex and engaging plot through a series of characters, ranging from military figures to relatives to the women in his life. In the end Santa Anna is an embittered and destroyed figure. In the process of reconstructing Santa Anna’s story, Serna questions the motives of more traditional historic writing, suggesting new and modern methods might be more appropriate.

Serrano, Marcela [Biography] Chilean novelist, she studied art before beginning to write fiction in the 1990s. She has published four novels that have been highly successful best sellers in Chile. Comparable in many ways to writers such as Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, and Luis Sepúlveda, Serrano is widely known as a commercial writer.

Shaman Winter (1999, by Rudolfo Anaya. Written in English. New York: Warner) [Novel] Author of classic Chicano fictions of the 1970s and 1980s, Anaya published a series of mystery novels in the 1990s and early in the twenty-first century. In Shaman Winter the author weaves a tale of abduction, murder, nuclear threat, cultural history, and Native American religion. The protagonist, a private investigator named Sonny Baca, is wheelchair bound, facing his own physical and spiritual recovery as well as discovery. He is called upon to help find young women who are being abducted in a pattern that parallels his dreams, where he encounters his ancestors and historic figures from New Mexico’s beginnings in 1598. Anaya displays his craftsmanship by weaving a postmodern mystery with cultural contexts alluding to traditional New Mexico and its people. The reader moves between multiple times and spaces, with dialogues strongly influenced by the Spanish of the region and cultural allusions relating to the Native American as well as Hispanic traditions.

Shipyard, The (See Astillero, El by Juan Carlos Onetti) [Novel]

Shua, Ana María [Biography] Argentine novelist, short story writer, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet, she born in Buenos Aires in 1951. She studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where she received an MA in literature and has made a living in journalism and screenwriting. She began publishing poetry in the 1960s and saw her first volume of poems, El sol y yo (The sun and I), published at the age of sixteen. During the military dictatorship she took refuge in Paris, where she worked as a journalist for the Spanish press. Her novel Soy paciente (1980, Patient) received the prestigious Premio Losada in Argentina. She has published two novels that were made into de Laurita (Little Laura’s loves). In 1993 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her novel El libro de los recuerdos, which appeared later in translation under the title The Book of Memories in 1999. Her recent novel La muerte como efecto secundario (1997, Death as a secondary effect) presents an invented future for a nation in political and economic crisis. Much of her work consists of volumes of short fiction that escape easy genre definition. Her 1984 volume La sueñera (The dreamer) is of this type, consisting of historias brevísimas (“very short stories”), and her volumes Viajando se conoce gente (1988, Traveling one meets people) and Casa de Geishas (1992, Geisha house) are also short fictions.

Silva, Abel [Biography] Brazilian novelist, short story writer, and journalist, he has held academic positions and has served as editor for newspapers. Born in Cabo Frio (Rio de Janeiro) in 1943, he studied literature at the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro. His novel O Afogado (1971, The drowned man) deals with a man who is metaphorically “drowned” in the sense that he suffers the paralysis and atrophy of the mediocre atmosphere he inhabits. Most of the first-person narrative is a lengthy flashback. His second book, Açogue das Almas (1973) is a group of short stories dealing with solitary and marginalized individuals.

Silva, Ricardo [Biography] Colombian novelist, short story writer, poet, and film critic, he was born in Bogotá in 1975. He completed his undergraduate studies in literature at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, followed by graduate work in film and television in Barcelona. His first novels were Relato de Navidad en la Gran Vía (2001, Christmas tale on the grand avenue) and Tic (2003). Silva has received a number of literary prizes in Spain and Colombia, and several critics consider him the most prominent new novelist in Colombia to be born in the 1970s.

Skármeta, Antonio [Biography] Chilean novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, he is widely considered a leading writer of the post-Boom of the Spanish American novel. Born in 1940, he began publishing highly successful short fiction in the late 1960s. He writes stories about working people and common folk, often using colloquial, everyday language. A supporter of leftist president Salvador Allende, Skármeta went into political exile to West Germany during the military dictatorship, holding a faculty position in the Academy of Cinema in Berlin. He is widely known as one of the major writers of the exile experience among those southern cone writers who went into political exile in the 1970s. His first novel, Soñé que la nieve ardía (1975, I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning), recounts a series of events leading up to the military coup and immediately following it.

So Far from God (1993, by Ana Castillo. Written in English. New York: Norton) [Novel] This is a story about the unique circumstance of strong women in Chicana society, written by one of the leading contemporary Chicana novelists. Castillo tells of the New Mexican desert town of Tomé and its incredible happenings. She writes in imitation of oral tradition; the narrator uses the same tone as the bilingual female characters. The plot centers on Sofi and the lives and deaths of her four daughters. The hard-working Sofi struggles to rear her girls and eventually manages to appoint herself mayor of Tomé in order to ease some of the poverty in her town. Esperanza, her oldest daughter, is an ambitious girl and social activist who pursues her career as a reporter to Saudi Arabia where she is kidnapped and killed. The physically attractive Caridad plays the role of bar girl, then becomes a curandera (healer), and finally follows the woman she loves into death. Fe is a serious girl who dies from the poisons in the factory where she works. La Loca is the youngest daughter and, after dying at the age of three and then being resurrected, lives as a recluse until she succumbs to AIDS. Sofi, bereft of her girls, founds M.O.M.A.S., the Mothers of Martyrs and Saints Society.

Solares, Ignacio [Biography] Mexican novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist, he is one of the leading writers of his generation. Born in 1945 in Chihuahua, he is known as a novelist who writes on the tenuous border between fantastic and empirical reality and has explored the historic reality of Mexico at the same time that much of his fiction puts into question the very nature of empirical reality. He tells stories of urban life in one of the largest cities in the world, Mexico City, with emphasis on human relationships and frequent excursions into the realm of the fantastic or supernatural. Most of his novels can be read as metaphors for urban life in postmodern Mexico, although he sometimes looks back nostalgically at Mexico City of the period from the 1940s to the 1960s. Although his work is postmodern in a general sense, he is an accessible writer with a relatively large readership in Mexico.

His novel Anónimo (1980, Anonymous) is among his more fantastic works. He began writing in the 1970s, publishing his first novel under the title Puertas al cielo (Doors to the sky) in 1976, the story of a boy of modest background who works as a bellboy, but the novel soon moves into the realm of the supernatural, as the boy receives visits from angels. Casas de encantamiento (1987, Houses of enchantment) focuses on 1940s Mexico City, but Solares blends together three different time periods. His first historical novel, Madero, el otro (1989, Madero’s Judgement), also deals with the supernatural, for it not only relates the history of the period of President Madero but also tells of the ex-president’s supernatural conversations with his deceased brother. Solares continued in a political vein with El gran elector (1991, The Great Mexican Electoral Game), his satire of the political process in Mexico, in which the main character is a synthesis of several historic presidents of Mexico. Columbus (1996) deals with the invasion of the United States by Pancho Villa. Solares was awarded the prestigious Premio Villarrutia in 1998 for his novel El sitio (1998, The place), a novel that begins in the realm of urban reality in Mexico City (an apartment building), but then moves toward a horrific world of the fantastic in which the inhabitants of the twenty apartments are shut off from all contact with the outside world and seem to be under siege. His recent novel El espía del aire (2001, The spy in the air) begins as a nostalgic look at the 1960s in Mexico City, then goes back to the 1940s and 1950s. This brief, self-reflexive work can also be read as an autobiography of a writer and of the generation in Mexico that was educated in the 1960s and began writing in the 1970s. Two of his novellas have appeared in English translation under the title Lost in the City: Tree of Desire and Serafin (1998, translation by Carolyn and John Brushwood) and demonstrate his unusual adeptness in portraying the complexities of the lives of young people in Mexico.

Solares has served in numerous roles in the cultural and academic spheres in Mexico, including editor of the weekly magazine Siempre, director of the Department of Literature at the National University in Mexico City, the UNAM, and director of cultural diffusion at the UNAM. He writes essays on literary and political topics and has written a documentary-type work on alcoholism titled Delerium Tremens (1979) as well as a recent book on the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, a literary father figure to whom Solares owes many debts. In addition to the Villarrutia prize, Solares has been recognized with several other prizes and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. He currently lives in Mexico City and holds an administrative position in the cultural sphere at the UNAM.

Sombras nada más (2002, No more than shadows, by Sergio Ramírez. Written in Spanish and untranslated. Mexico: Alfaguara) [Novel] Ramírez is known as a former Sandinista leader in Nicaragua as well as one of the major contemporary novelists of the Central American region. Sombras nada más tells the story of the capture of Alirio Martinico in the days leading up to the fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. Somoza’s former private secretary is accused of illicit acts and is taken to a popular court. The reader is introduced to the social and economic conditions in Nicaragua, including repression, poverty, and imprisonment. The reader also has access to several documents—texts that, in the mode of Jorge Luis Borges, are in fact false documents and, in reality, just more fiction. Ramírez leads the reader to speculate on the nature of historical truth in politically intense environments, and with this work contributes to his rewriting of the history of Nicaragua. He portrays a contradictory and bleak environment.

Sommers, Armonía (Armonía Etchepare de Henestrosa) [Biography] Uruguayan novelist, short story writer, and essayist, she is one of the major contemporary women writers in Latin America. There is no common agreement about her exact birth date; she was born approximately in 1920. She has dedicated much of her life to education, but since the early 1970s has concentrated primarily on her writing. Her fiction tends to emphasize sexuality, the fantastic, and the exceptional; the world she fictionalizes is senseless and cruel, with characters who suffer from solitude and anguish. Since publishing her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The nude woman) in 1950, she has written novels and short fiction from the 1950s to the 1990s. In La mujer desnuda she relates an allegorical story of a young woman’s rebellion against the norms of conventional society, and this novel was considered scandalous in Uruguay. Her second novel, De miedo en miedo (1965, From fear to fear), consists of a monologue by a nameless man and the adulterous relationship he has with a woman. In the end he suffers anguish and confronts nothingness. Her third novel, Un retrato para Dickens (1969, A portrait for Dickens), is the story of an orphaned girl, but the complex narrative lines and multiple narrators make it one of her most challenging novels. Her later Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora (1986, Only elephants find mandrake roots), however, is her most lengthy and complex novel to date, telling the story of a woman’s searching for self-realization and meaning, but this is only the central story to a multilayered narration. Viaje al corazón del día (1986, Voyage to the heart of the day) tells both a family story and a story within a story.

Soriano, Osvaldo [Biography] Argentine novelist born in 1943, he became an important figure as a writer in exile during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. After the dictatorship he returned to Argentina and published a set of essays titled Artistas, locos y criminales (1983, Artists, lunatics and criminals).

Sorrentino, Fernando [Biography] Argentine novelist born in 1942, he belongs to a venerable tradition of writers in his nation who, in the face of humiliating social circumstances and codes, have opted for black humor as a response. He has published an entire corpus of grotesque fictions replete with dark irony and allegory, much of which alludes to Argentine history.

One of his more typical texts, El rigor de las desdichas (1994, The rigors of calamities), consists of three narratives, two of which are historical chronicles and one of which is a fantastic allegory. The first of the chronicles, a narrative titled “Carta a Graciela Conforte de Sicardi” is about a failed dramatist, told in a setting of class and social conflict. It also involves self-humiliation, as does “Historia de don José Montilla,” the story of a haberdasher’s suicide. In the allegorical “Cuaderno del ingeniero Sismondi,” Sorrentino invents a República Autónoma that is even more capable of producing injustice than is Argentina itself.

Soto, Pedro Juan [Biography] Puerto Rican novelist who belongs to that nation’s generation of 1940, he was born in Castaño, Puerto Rico, in 1929 and died in Puerto Rico on November 6, 2002. When in the maturity of his academic career, he was devastated by the assassination of his son by the Puerto Rican police because the youth worked in favor of Puerto Rican independence. He is well-known for his volume of short stories, Spiks (1957, Spics). He was one of the first modern Puerto Rican novelists to gain an international reputation, although critics and scholars were slow to recognize his presence and enormous impact in Caribbean letters. He is best known for his novel Usmail (1959, U.S. mail).

Souza, Márcio [Biography] Novelist, playwright, and filmmaker, he has gained a considerable literary reputation in Brazil and beyond since the publication of his first novel in 1976, Galvez, Imperador do Acre (The Emperor of the Amazon). He is known as one of Brazil’s masters of parody and satire who frequently employs pastiche and carnivalization. Souza was born in Manaus in the Amazon region in 1946, has been writing fiction and theater since the 1960s, and has established a publishing company as well as headed the National Book Department of the National Library in the early 1990s. His fiction is highly accessible, widely read, and entertaining. A writer who also has significant themes to develop, his work is comparable to the writings of the Nobel laureate of Colombia, Gabriel García Márquez.

Souza is best known as the political satirist who penned the works Galvez, Imperador do Acre and Mad María (1980, Mad Maria). Galvez, Imperador do Acre is a parody of the Spanish picaresque novel set in the nineteenth century. In it he tells the wild adventures of a nineteenth-century entrepreneur in the Amazon whose amorous conquests put him by chance into the political arena. This first novel is critical of local institutions in the Amazon. He continues his political satire in Mad María and later works. O Brasileiro Voador (1986, The flying Brazilian) is a fictionalized biography of Alberto Santos Dumont, a national hero whom the Brazilians consider the first man to have flown an airplane. Souza calls his text A Resistível Ascensão do Boto Tucaxi (1982, The resistable ascention of Boto Tucaxi) a folhetim, and it is a parodic satire of a Brazilian political figure.

Spota, Luis [Biography] Mexican novelist, short story writer, and playwright, he was widely read in Mexico during the 1950s and 1960s as a critic of Mexican society and its political structure. He wrote for the masses in Mexico, and his novels reflect many of the aberrations and scandalous aspects of Mexican society. He published his first volume of short stories, De la noche al día (From night to day) in 1944 and also published two book-length biographies and two plays in the 1940s. As a novelist he was a conventional social critic. He published novels from the late 1940s until his death in 1985 and is known for his best-selling Casi el paraíso (1956, Almost Paradise). He was born in Mexico City in 1925 and was self-educated. He worked as a journalist for several newspapers in Mexico City and was director of Novedades and El Heraldo Cultural. He was president of the Mexican Boxing Association from 1958 to 1984. Between the 1940s and the 1980s he received several literary prizes, including the Premio Mazatlán de Literatura in 1984 for his novel Paraíso 25 (1983, Paradise 25). In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the few Mexican novelists who could make a living writing novels.

Spota published twenty-five novels, and his most noteworthy work, Casi el paraíso, is his critique of café society. Spota has been taken to task by critics for expressing himself so strongly that sometimes he can appear to be silly. The novel is a journalistic exposé, denouncing the corruption of power in Mexico City, including both Mexican and foreign powermongers. In this work Spota does not attempt to probe the deeper realities of the Modernists such as his contemporaries Agustín Yáñez or Juan Rulfo; his main contribution is his cosmopolitanism and his concern for the disenfranchised in Mexico. It is also an important contribution to the novel of social protest: he criticizes Mexico’s elite not only for their excessive interest in wealth but also for their lack of interest in the common good and the common people.

Selected Work: Murieron a mitad del río (1948); La estrella vacía (1950); Más cornadas da el hambre (1950); Vagabunda (1950); Las grandes aguas (1954); Casi el paraíso (1956, Almost Paradise, 1965); Las horas violentas (1958); La sangre enemiga (1959); El tiempo de la ira (1960); La carcajada del gato (1964); Los sueños del insomnio (1964); La pequeña edad (1965); La plaza (1971); El viaje (1973); Palabras mayores (1975); Retrato hablado (1975); Sobre la marcha (1976); El primer dia (1977); El rostro del sueño (1979); Las vísperas del trueno (1980): Mitad oscura (1982); Paraíso 25 (1983); Los días contados (1984); Días de poder (1985); De cuerpo presente y otros textos (1991).

Steen, Edna Van [Biography] Brazilian short story writer, screenwriter, and playwright, she has had a multifaceted career in Brazil, including film and acting. She was born in the state of Santa Catarina in 1936 of parents from Germany and Belgium. At an early age she was involved with the media—radio, broadcasting, film, and journalism—and began writing short stories in the late 1950s. Her fiction has received praise from critics in Brazil and has been widely read. Much of her writing involves women’s lives that have been a failure. Her first novel, Memórias do Medo (1974, Memories of fear), is a subtle critique of the military dictatorship under which it was written. Her second novel, Corações Mordidos (1983, Village of the Ghost Bells), begins with an epigraph from Pirandello and is her first piece of postmodern metafiction, questioning the ability of a novel to represent reality. The portrayal of a woman protagonist without a fixed identity also associates the novel with postmodern and feminist theory. Men are vague and tenuous images, and the dead rise from their graves. Her novel Madrugada (1992, Early Morning) received two prizes in Brazil. Covering a single night, this third novel portrays an eerie urban landscape of São Paulo, with characters from all sectors of Brazilian society. Her terse, virtually minimalist style seems to correspond to the minimalist lives of the city’s inhabitants, and the novel ends with multiple images of death. Her volume Cheiro do amor (1996, Scent of Love) consists of two lengthy stories. Recently she has been involved in writing plays and promoting women writers, in addition to other feminist activism.

Steimberg, Alicia [Biography] Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist, she was born in Buenos Aires in 1933. She was the child of immigrants from Romania and Russia who were among the early Jewish immigrants to Buenos Aires. A common theme of her fiction is economic and psychological instability, with which her childhood was marked: her father died when she was eight years old and her mother lost her position as a dentist because she refused to sign a loyalty oath to Perón. She studied English at the Instituto de Lenguas Vivas and was engaged in creative writing from her youth but did not begin publishing until relatively late in her life. She published her first novel, Músicos y relojeros (Musicians and Watchmakers) in 1971.

Taibo II, Paco Ignacio [Biography] Mexican novelist, short story writer, historian, translator, journalist, and essayist, he is widely recognized in Mexico as one of the nation’s leading writers of detective fiction. Born in Gijón, Spain, in 1949, he is a naturalized Mexican citizen. He has been a professor and researcher at the National University in Mexico City (UNAM) and editor of the Spanish book series called Etiqueta Negra. He has held a variety of positions in the sphere of journalism, including director of the magazine Bronca, codirector of La Semana, and head of information at Fin de Siglo. He began writing detective fiction in the 1970s, publishing his first detective novel, Días de combate (Combat days) in 1976; it has received national and international prizes and has been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, and Italian. He has published over ten books of essays on topics relating to labor history and class conflict, most of which focuses on Mexican and Cuban politics.

Taibo II has published over twenty-five novels; he oft en writes more than one book a year. One of his more substantial and noteworthy works, La bicicleta de Leonardo (1993, Leonardo’s bicycle), is an exercise in excess and is more voluminous than most of his fictions. An elaborate metafiction, this novel deals with the effects of popular culture on individual characters along the border and in the capital. More specifically, it tells the store of how a Mexican detective fiction writer falls in love with an adolescent basketball player. The novel, however, takes the reader into a series of digressions beyond this basic plot, including Leonardo Da Vinci’s invention of the bicycle, a worker’s strike in Barcelona in 1921, and the American invasion of Saigon in the 1960s.

Tavares, Zulmira Ribeiro [Biography] Tavares writes stories of families she envisions as microcosms of Brazilian society. She began her career as a satirist of the Brazilian family with her first novel, O Nome do Bispo (1985, The bishop’s name). In Jóias de Família (1990, Family jewels) Tavares continues her family satire, constructing another intimate family story as opposed to the broad, panoramic works that many Latin American writers use to portray society. An elderly and dignified widow, Maria Bráulia Munhoz, is the protagonist; her affluent days are over, but she follows the daily rituals that have characterized her entire life with her faithful black maid, Maria Preta. As suggested by the title, family jewels are also central to this narrative: an omniscient narrator establishes the connection between these objects and empty family values. Maria Preta is also equated to one of these antiquated, expensive objects. This maid’s grandniece, however, rejects the values, behaviors, and expectations of the maid, choosing a more modern set of values and independent life. Despite all these negatives with respect to Maria Bráulia, the narrator creates empathy for the protagonist.

Telles, Lygia Fagundes [Biography] Novelist and short story writer, she is a popular fiction writer in Brazil. Born in São Paulo in 1924, she has been active in the Brazilian literary scene since the 1940s and began publishing short stories when she was young, gaining a reputation over the years as skilled master of the craft of fiction. Her first volume of stories, Porão e Sobrado (1938, Basement and Two-Story House), appeared in 1938. She was reared in several rural towns in the interior of the state of São Paulo, as her family moved often; her father was a chief of police and criminal prosecutor. Telles studied law in São Paulo at a time when Brazilian society was rigidly conventional with respect to women. Consequently, her early professional career and her early writing represented a rejection of many of the norms of Brazilian society in the 1940s and 1950s. As her career developed, so did Brazilian society’s acceptance of professional women who were writers and intellectuals. She was associated with a group of writers identified as the generation of 1945 who reacted against the avant-garde and the experimental excesses of some Brazilian writing of the 1920s and 1930s. Thus Telles and the generation of 1945 were conventionalists who returned to some of the traditional literary forms. She has been involved in journalism since the 1940s, writing regular pieces for the Folha de São Paulo. She became a member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras in 1982 and died in 2003.

Testimonio [Topic] A type of fiction that was popularized in the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, it is based on reality as testimonial or documentary writing. Rigoberta Menchú, Elizabeth Burgos, Eduardo Galeano, Miguel Barnet, Elena Poniatowska, and Rodolfo Walsh and others have popularized the genre since the late 1960s. Testimonio has no exact equivalent in the English language or the Anglo-American literary tradition, but it is closely allied to genres such as American New Journalism and the documentary novel.

In the testimonio there is often an interaction between an interviewer and a witness, a special relationship between the editor and the interlocutor, and intellectual commitment and solidarity with the causes of the marginalized and their need to have a voice. In Biografía de un cimarrón (1966, Autobiography of a Runaway Slave) Miguel Barnet engages in ethnographic research to tell the story of Afro-Cubans who have been marginalized. Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983, I Rigoberta Menchú), on the other hand, is the result of Elizabeth Burgos Debray’s interviewing the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú and then editing the volume. In contrast, in Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación massacre (1965, Operation massacre) and Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (1970, Massacre in Mexico) historical events are covered in a fashion comparable to New Journalism.

Tezza, Cristovão [Biography] Brazilian novelist, poet, actor, and teacher, he was born in Lages (state of Santa Catarina) in 1952. He is known as an irreverent and innovative writer in Brazil. At the age of ten he moved with his family to the city of Curitiba. He became active in theater in the 1960s and involved with the Pocket Theater group in 1968, writing scripts. Shortly thereafter he also became involved in writing for film with Ari Para-Raio and Oraci Gemba. In 1970 he completed his studies at the State College of Paraná. In the following years he wrote for various theater groups and also participated as an actor. He went to Portugal to study, but the University of Coimbra was closed by the dictator Salazar. While traveling through Europe after the closure of the university, he began his prolific output of short stories. In Frankfurt, Germany, he worked illegally as a house cleaner. In 1977 he married and moved to Rio Branco in Brazil, where he wrote his novel Gran Circo das Américas (Great circus of the Americas). At the University of Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, he worked as an instructor of Portuguese and published Trapo (1982, Rag) and Aventuras Provisórias (1984, Provisional adventures). In 1986 he returned to Curitiba to be a professor of Portuguese. He defended his dissertation for a master’s degree in Portuguese in 1987.

Tierra de nadie (1941, No Man’s Land, by Juan Carlos Onetti. Translated by Peter Bush. London: Quartet, 1994) [Novel] A key novel in Onetti’s cycle of works, the author introduces the character Larsen-the-corpse-gatherer and begins to create the Uruguayan master’s imaginary town of Santa María. He also depicts a generation of frustrated and alienated intellectuals and political activists. The basic plot involves a group of characters, the central one of which is Aránzuru, a lawyer who has relationships with two women, Nené and Nora. His friend is Num. Aránzuru has relationships with several other women, including a prostitute with whom he lives for a while. Other members of the group include artists and intellectuals. Larsen seems to belong to the world of crime, but the exact nature of his shady activities is ambiguous. Two characters live closer to the world of politics and a “revolutionary” cause, but the ethics of their work is questionable. The book’s sixty-one brief chapters are written in a cinematic style, and the novel is fragmented. The fact that many chapters seem unconnected is one of the novel’s salient features. Related to this fragmented structure is the creation of fragmented characters who are in a constant process of change. The protagonist’s quest is a confrontation of an alienated self in an urban environment.

Tizón, Héctor [Biography] Argentine novelist born in 1929, he writes of the region in and around Salta. He began publishing fiction in the early 1960s, issuing his first volume of short stories, A un costado de los rieles (At a side of the rails). He is a modernist who writes fragmented fiction, often in a biblical and mythical tone that represents a search for the authentic values of Argentina. He relies heavily on the oral tradition of the region, evoking popular songs and legends; these traditional motifs of gaucho literature in Argentina are counterbalanced by modernist strategies, including the use of interior monologues. He is widely recognized in Argentina as one of the nation’s most accomplished contemporary short story writers, and he published an anthology of his personal favorites among his short stories under the title Recuento in 1984. He is also becoming increasingly recognized as a novelist.

Todas las sangres (1964, All bloods, by José María Arguedas. Buenos Aires: Losada) [Novel] A Peruvian novel that focuses on the power struggles between the modernizing forces of Peru’s entrepreneurs and multinational mining corporations and the feudal lords who hold the local Incan population as serfs on their ancient haciendas, this is one of Arguedas’s best-known works. Using dialogue in Quechua as well as songs, Arguedas evokes the eternal Incan presence of the high Andes as well as the Castillian world of government and power. The cruel don Bruno aids his ambitious brother Fermin in creating a mine by providing the unremunerated labor of his Indians. Rendon Wilkes becomes the leader of the indigenous workers and befriends Bruno. Through Rendon’s influence, the indigenous people throughout the district restore Incan social structures to avert famine and consolidate their ability to earn a wage for their labor. The possibility of silver discoveries in the town of San Pedro attracts the Wisther Bozart mining conglomerate, which brutalizes the community, shooting into an angry crowd and burning down the local church. Any reproaches against the company are met with the accusation of communist sympathies and immediate incarceration or execution. Bruno’s fanatical religious traditionalism leads him to attack the feudal injustice he inherited. The company’s exploitation and continuation of the colonial legacy is met by stoic indigenous resistance.

Torres, Antônio [Biography] Born in Junco in the state of Bahia, Brazil, in 1940, he is a novelist who has worked professionally in journalism and advertising. He has written for newspapers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Being from the northeastern region of Brazil, however, his novels are populated with characters suffering the difficulties of the harsh life in that region, where attempts at agrarian reform have been resisted by large landowners. Torres has the reputation for being a political writer: he is viewed as a spokesman for the poor migrants from the northeastern region; he has inherited this position from generation of socially conscious writers that include Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, and Rachel de Queiroz. Many novelists writing under the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s have been seen as fundamentally apolitical; Torres rejected this position by returning to the ethical positions of his forerunners from the northeastern region. In his later and more recent fiction he has been less overtly political. He focuses on the disinherited in his first novel, Um Cão Uivando para a Lua (1972, A dog howlng at the moon), a work that deals with radically different perceptions of Brazilian society as seen through two characters, one more conventional, one less so. Set in an insane asylum, this novel has been read as a metaphor for Brazilian society of the 1970s. His second novel, Os Homens dos Pés Redondos (1973, The men with round feet), is set in Portugal and deals with the effects of political oppression on the individual; this novel directly refers to the dictatorship of Antônio de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal and indirectly to the military dictatorship in Brazil. In Essa Terra (1976, That land) he tells the story of a family’s exodus from their traditional home in Bahia to São Paulo and the attendant economic and social crises that follow. In his Balada da Infância Perdida (1986, Blues for a Lost Childhood) Torres continues with the story of the protagonist from the previous work, who recalls his childhood of poverty and exploitation. It covers a period of thirty years, and we see his engagement in politics as a worker. The narrative fragments also contain nightmares influenced by alcohol and multiple conversations and thought processes, many of which involve his fear of losing his job. In O Chorro e o Lobo (1997, The pup and the wolf) he has his main character return to his home in the northeast of Brazil after a lengthy absence and reconsiders this character’s relationship with the land and the region. In his more recent work Torres has changed focus; Um Taxi para Viena d’Austria (1991, A taxi for Vienna of Austria) is a parodic and satirical detective novel. His fiction has been translated into several languages.

Toscana, David [Biography] Mexican novelist, short story writer, translator, and essayist, he is a leading writer of his generation who has quickly gained recognition in Spain and the U.S. He belongs to the generation of writers born in Mexico in the 1960s who began publishing in the 1990s and has been associated with the McOndo group of Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez. This group openly defies the methods of magical realism and tends to prefer a fiction with more urban or interior spaces or both. Toscana’s work is characterized by strong plots, memorable characters, and a complex interweaving of subplots and different levels of time. Toscana is a follower of the Peruvian master Mario Vargas Llosa precisely because of Vargas Llosa’s commitment to engaging the reader with strong, complex plots and enigmatic characters. Toscana is also an avid reader of the fiction of Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, admiring the Uruguayan writer’s skepticism and tendencies toward nihilism, two attitudes that pervade Toscana’s writing.

His two major novels, Estación Tula (1995, Tula Station) and Santa Maria del Circo (1998, Our Lady of the Circus) were reviewed well in both the Mexican and U.S. press. In Estación Tula the intricate plot operates on several levels of the past and present of a small town in northern Mexico. Santa Maria del Circo is a novel about how a ghost town in the desert of northern Mexico is transformed into the living community of Santa Maria del Circo when a troupe of performers abandon their circus in order to settle down. Interwoven into the complicated plot are the strange life stories of the nine new residents. They include a midget, a bearded lady, an overweight strongman, a contortionist, a human cannonball, a magician, a female trapeze artist, and an elderly ringmaster. After an elaborate series of events, the midget and the strongman lock themselves in the abandoned church, leaving little hope beyond a darkly ironic sense of humor regarding the indefatigable march of humanity along an empty path.

Tovar, Juan [Biography] Mexican novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer, he was born in Puebla (state of Puebla), Mexico, in 1941. He began studies in engineering and then abandoned this field in order to pursue studies on the theory and practice of theater with Luisa Josefina Hernández. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Tovar taught theater himself in several institutions in Mexico City. He has also taught screenwriting. He has published essays in numerous Mexican literary magazines as well as the prestigious Cuban Casa de las Américas. His early fiction was associated with the rebellious counterculture group of the Onda in 1960s Mexico. His first short fiction appeared in the mid-1960s, and his first novel, El mar bajo la tierra (1967, The sea below the earth), deals with growing up and generational differences in the context of the 1960s counterculture.

Traición de Rita Hayworth, La (1968, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, by Manuel Puig. Translation Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Dutton, 1971) [Novel] The town of Coronel Villegas is the setting for this novel of a middle-class family in the 1930s and 1940s. The main characters are the parents, Berto and Mita, and their son Toto. The dull and monotonous life of this town has one saving grace: a movie house where Toto can escape into the glamorous world of the Hollywood movies of Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Rita Hayworth, and the like. The book’s sixteen chapters consist of sixteen monologues and dialogues, with no controlling third-person voice. Thus the active postmodern reader must make corrections among the characters, situations, and chapters. The protagonist, Toto, is the speaker of the monologues of chapters 3 and 5, and the writer of chapter 13. He is also the character most discussed. Underneath the apparently banal anecdotes, a complex series of power relations unfold, and the reader becomes aware that Toto’s story is that of a gay boy in the process of becoming an artist.

Treinta años (1999, Leaving Tabasco, by Carmen Boullosa. Translation by Geoff Hargreaves. New York: Grove, 2001) [Novel] With elements of the classic bildungsroman and the Spanish picaresque, this novel relates the story of a young Mexican girl growing up and discovering her sexuality. She comes of age in rural Mexico, then going into exile in Germany, where she lives for thirty years. With some allusions to Latin American magical realism, Boullosa evokes García Márquez in her use of a small town as a microcosm of Latin American society suffering numerous social problems and injustices. These allusions make the novel more a parody than a reproduction of the Colombian master’s work. The protagonist struggles to recover her memory in the face of modernization and globalization, and the importance of memory as part of identity is underlined. A satire of numerous professions, this novel is also a parody of several novelistic traditions beyond the bildungsroman and the picaresque. Easily accessible, Treinta años is one of the works that has made Boullosa one of Mexico’s most widely read novelists. This novel belongs in a venerable tradition of Latin American novels that challenge conventional ideas about the value of Western progress and modernization.

Trevisan, Dalton Jérson [Biography] Brazilian short story writer and novelist, he was born in Curitiba in 1925. His first stories were published as imitations of the traditional Literatura de cordel of the northeastern region of Brazil. Trevisan has disavowed authorship of his first works of short stories, Sonata ao Luar (1945, Sing to the night) and Sete Anos de Pastor (1946, Seven years as pastor), both created in this style. From 1946 until 1948 he edited a literary magazine, Joaquim, which he designed to be the voice of his generation, that included such prominent names in Brazil as Antônio Candido, Mario de Andrade, Otto Maria Carpeaux, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. During this time Trevisan began avoiding publicity—refusing to have his picture taken or give interviews. He worked as a journalist—often covering crime stories—and married in 1953.

Trevisan became widely recognized as a fiction writer in Brazil in the late 1950s with his Novelas nada Exemplares (1959, Not exemplary novels), which won the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti in 1959. By 1970 his works were being translated for an international market that was attracted to his often critical and pessimistic portrayal of urban life in Brazil. His works have been translated into English, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, and Swedish. His dark humor depicts frustrated souls with serious character defects and moral contradictions. Some of his characters simply have difficulties in dealing with everyday life. Trevisan has won numerous awards for other books of short stories including Cemiterio de Elefantes (1964, Elephant cemetery), also a Jabuti prizewinner and the winner of another national literary prize. His Morte na Praça (1964, Death in the plaza) received the Premio Luis Claudio de Sousa of the Brazilian PEN Club. His book Guerra Conjugal (1969, Conjugal war) was made into a film by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade in 1975. In 1996 he received the Premio Ministerio da Cultura de Literatura for lifetime achievement in literature. In 2003 he won another important literary prize in Brazil jointly with Bernardo Carvalho.

Trevisan, João Silverio [Biography] Brazilian novelist, screenwriter, film director, translator, essayist, and short story writer, he was born in 1944. He has published a book-length essay, Devassos no Paraíso (1985, Missteps in paradise), on gay life and culture in Brazil. He began publishing short fiction in the 1970s, and since the early 1980s has been publishing complex novels in dialogue with international postmodern fiction. He is the author of the volume of short stories Troços e Destroços (Bits and destructions).

Ubidia, Abdón [Biography] Ecuadorian novelist, essayist, and journalist, he has been associated with several cultural and political movements in Ecuador. In the 1960s he was involved with the progressive Tzántzico movment. He collaborated with the magazine La Bufanda del Sol and later founded the magazine Palabra Suelta.

With respect to his fiction writing, Ubidia has been committed to taking fiction of this region from its traditional location in the jungle and rural areas to the city. He was also interested in experimenting with the technical innovations associated with high modernism. Ubidia is a leading Ecuadorian urban writer who often writes about the hampa—the marginalized—in these urban spaces. Much of his novel Sueño de lobos (1986, Wolves’ Dream) concerns the daily lives and everyday anecdotes in an underworld of crime, drugs, pool halls, street vendors, and the like. The action, which leads to a bank robbery, takes place over a period of several months in 1980. The innovative structure consists of a rotating focus on the approximately half-dozen main characters. Ubidia does not construct fast-moving plots, but he does create memorable characters. He has received several literary prizes in Ecuador, including a national prize for Sueño de lobos.

Urrea, Luis Alberto [Biography] Chicano author who has spent a lifetime on or near the U.S./Mexican border of Tijuana, he has written several books of fiction and nonfiction describing the experience of border life. Born in Tijuana in 1955, his focus is on the marginalized: he travels back and forth between Tijuana and the United States, and on the Mexican side he moves amidst garbage dumps, cardboard houses, impoverished communities on hillsides dominated by roving gangs. In his book Across the Wire, Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993) he describes the random violence of these gangs, as well as the environmental violence of whole neighborhoods appearing and disappearing seemingly overnight, constructed on garbage dumps oozing toxic fumes. The Tijuana that Urrea describes is beyond the control of the Mexican police, who are portrayed as totally corrupt.

Uslar Pietri, Arturo [Biography] Venezuelan novelist born in Caracas in 1906, he is best known for his novel Las lanzas coloradas (1933, The Red Lances). As a young child, his family moved to Cagua, a small town near Caracas, where he became familiar with the land and nature in general that would appear regularly in the fiction he later wrote. In Cagua and later in Maracay he also became aware of the folklore and oral tradition that grew to be essential to his writing. This physical setting and the characters who peopled his fiction were often part of this rural experience. He read avidly in his youth and began publishing essays, short fiction, and poetry at an early age—he published his first article (at the age of fourteen) on bananas in a local newspaper. He studied law at the Universidad Central de Caracas during the 1920s, a period when he was actively involved with the intellectual life and literary world of young intellectuals. With his cohorts he not only read the major exponents of Spanish American modernismo but also such writers as Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Gabriel Miró, Azorín, and other European writers. Uslar Pietri and other upstarts, inspired by the new writing of the European avant-garde, founded the magazine Válvula in 1928, in which they attacked the “rancid” tradition of Venezuelan letters. That same year Uslar Pietri published his first volume of short fiction, Barrabás y otros relatos (1920, Barrabás and other stories). In addition to publishing over forty books of fiction, essays, and theater, Uslar Pietri has dedicated a lifetime to diplomacy, editing, public service, and teaching.

Valdés, Zoé [Biography] Cuban novelist, poet, short story writer, and screenwriter, she has been working in exile in Paris since 1995 and enjoying remarkable international success. She writes of the experience of being a woman, of being a foreigner in exile in Europe, and of her own tenuous cultural identity as a Cuban exile. Born in Havana in 1959, she studied philology at the University of Havana. She worked in the Cuban delegation before the UNESCO in Paris from 1983 to 1987 and returned to Cuba to work in a variety of capacities, among them subdirector of the Revista de Cine Cubano until late 1994.

Valdés has refreshingly new ideas about exile and the literature of exile. Writing after the onslaught of novels written in the 1980s by Latin American political exiles (mostly from Chile, Argentina, and Cuba), she has rejected many of the clichés about living and writing in exile. Most important, she rejects and mocks the nostalgia that pervades much of this fiction. She has enjoyed considerable success in Latin America and Europe with her novel Café nostalgia (1997, Nostalgia café), one of the works in which nostalgia is the object of satire rather than the traditional emotion of attachment to the past—a type of postmodern nostalgia.

Valenzuela, Luisa [Biography] Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist, she is a major contemporary woman writer in Latin America, an urban writer with interests in politics and feminism. Valenzuela was born Buenos Aires in 1938 and reared in a family of intellectuals: her mother is the writer Luisa Mercedes Levinson. As a child, Valenzuela had ample access to a vast array of books, and as a young woman she read modern masters such as William Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Somerset Maugham. Jorge Luis Borges and Cortázar, whom she knew personally, were also important to her literary formation. She left Argentina for France at age twenty, after marrying a French sailor, and her experience in Paris led her to the writing of her first novel, Hay que sonreír (1966, Clara). Over the years she has been engaged in wide-ranging studies and activities, from the “pataphysics” of the French writer Alfred Jarry to the study of the Mapuche Indians in Chile and shamans in Mexico.

Valenzuela’s major novels are Cambio de armas (1982, Other Weapons), Cola de lagartija (1983, Lizards Tale), and Novela negra con argentinos (1990, Black Novel). The last is only a detective novel on the surface, for it operates on many levels and, like many detetective novels written in Latin America, is more a reflection on the genre than a true participant in it. There is a murder to be solved, although the victim and the motive become increasingly vague as the novel progresses. The protagonist takes literature too seriously, making him a murderer, and literature makes another character lose track of reality. Many of the chararacters in this postmodern text fluctuate in their sexual orientation, from bisexual to homosexual and heterosexual relationships. Their names also change in this novel of constant flux. With numerous allusions to other Argentine writers, this is a novel of seemingly infinite levels of self-reflection as well as reflection upon the sometimes nightmarish social and political reality of Latin America.

Selected Work: Hay que sonreír (1966, Clara, translation Hortense Capentier and J. Jorge Castello, 1976); Los heréticos (1967); El gato eficaz (1972); Aquí pasan cosas raras (1975, Strange Things Happen Here, translation Helen R. Lane, 1979); Como en la guerra (1977, He Who Searches, translation Helen R. Lane, 1987); Libro que no muerde (1980); Cambio de armas (1982, Other Weapons, translation Deborah Bonner, 1985); Donde viven las águilas (1983, Up Among the Eagles, 1988); Cola de lagartija (1983, Lizards Tale, translation Gregory Rabassa, 1983), and Novela negra con argentinos (1990, Black Novel, translation Tony Talbot, 1992).

Vallejo, Fernando [Biography] Colombian novelist, biologist, and screenwriter, he was awarded one of most the prestigious literary prizes in Latin America (Premio Rómulo Gallegos) in 2003. He began writing scandalous satires of Colombia’s upper crust and their mores in the 1980s, bring out a trilogy of novels he has titled El río del tiempo (“The river of time”). He is also the most recognized writer of gay themes in Colombia. Born in Colombia, he has lived the major portion of his adult life in Mexico. He has published two books of nonfiction: a biography of an early-century Colombian poet and a study of literary language, Logoi: una gramática del lenguaje literario (1997, Logoi: a grammar of literary language).

Vargas Llosa, Mario [Biography] Peruvian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist, he is associated with the 1960s Boom and widely recognized as one of the leading writers of the twentieth century in Latin America. He was been actively involved in Latin American culture and politics since the 1960s, establishing a reputation as one of the leading novelists writing in the Spanish language. He was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936, and became a world-class writer of Peruvian nationality before eventually assuming Spanish nationality, too, making him a writer of dual citizenship since the early 1990s. In Latin America he was widely recognized for his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1962, The Time of the Hero), his critique of corruption in a military school and the beginning of a life-long career denouncing Peruvian institutions. The complex juxtaposition of different narrative planes, with multiple narrative voices, is reminiscent of Faulkner, who was Vargas Llosa’s idol when he became interested in fiction writing. In fact, on several occasions Vargas Llosa has described how, as a student beginning to write, he read Faulkner “with my pen in hand.” Vargas Llosa has also written less Faulknerian, light, and humorous works, such as La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977, Aunt Julia and the Script Writer).

The overall quality of Vargas Llosa’s fiction is impressively consistent. Nevertheless, most critics agree that his major novels are La casa verde (1966, The Green House), Conversación en La Catedral (1969, Conversation in The Catedral), La guerra del fin del mundo (1981, The War of the End of the World), and La fiesta del Chivo (2000, Feast of the Goat). These are four lengthy, complex, and dense works with ample historical breadth and rich mythical overtones. In La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral he continues his Faulknerian project, and with increased technical complexity. La casa verde is set in the jungles of Peru (upper Amazon area) and the city of Piura (northern desert of Peru) and consists of four apparently disconnected narrative lines that eventually intersect to tell the story of a small group of characters whose lives cross paths in the jungle, in Piura, or both. Vargas Llosa uses a variety of styles and voices (exterior and interior to the action) in this critique of the practices of the state, the church, and the military. La casa verde represents a more ambitious approach to fiction writing than anything Vargas Llosa had written to date, and his next novel, Conversación en La Catedral is an even more complex work of epic proportions. In it Vargas Llosa explores the military dictatorship in Peru in the 1950s, a repressive period for both the nation and the generation of young intellectuals to which the author belongs. He was a student and a journalist during the 1950s. In La guerra del fin del mundo the technical complexity is less evident; nevertheless, it is another epic approach to a historic period, in this case an exceptionally violent civil war in Brazil in the early twentieth century. In this novel Vargas Llosa sets forth another of his lifelong concerns and literary themes: his critique of political fanaticism, which, in turn, is a questioning of all types of fanaticism. His more recent La fiesta del Chivo is a rewriting of the history of a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and it is another multilayered and multivoiced political novel that presents much of the most horrorific side of the abuse of political power. Along with Gabriel García Márquez, Clarice Lispector, Carlos Fuentes, João Guimarães Rosa, and Julio Cortázar, Vargas Llosa is one of the major Latin American novelists of the twentieth century.

Selected Work: La ciudad y los perros (1962, The Time of the Hero, translation Lysander Kemp, 1966); La casa verde (1966, The Green House, translation Gregory Rabassa, 1973); Conversación en La Catedral (1969, Conversation in The Catedral, translation Gregory Rabassa, 1975); Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1974, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, translation Ronald Christ and Gregory Kolovakos, 1978); La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977, Aunt Julia and the Script Writer, translation Helen R. Lane, 1983); La guerra del fin del mundo (1981, The War of the End of the World, translation Helen R. Lane, 1984); Historia de Mayta (1984, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, translation Alfred MacAdam, 1986); Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1986, Who Killed Palomino Molero? translation Alfred Macadam, 1987); El hablador (1987, The Storyteller, translation Helen R. Lane, 1989); Elogio de la madrasta (1988, In Praise of the Stepmother, translation Helen R. Lane, 1990); Lituma en los Andes (1993); Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997); La fiesta del Chivo (2000, Feast of the Goat, translation Edith Grossman, 2001); El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003).

Vasquez, Juan Gabriel [Biography] Colombian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist, he was born in Bogotá in 1973. He is one of the most noteworthy novelists in Colombia to be born in the 1970s.

Vasquez Díaz, René [Biography] Cuban novelist, journalist, and translator, he went into exile in 1975 and has been writing in Sweden ever since. He writes of social injustice, political exile, and the consequences of these two. In his fiction he engages in some of the self-referential play commonly associated with postmodernism.

His novel Querido traidor (1993, Beloved traitor) refers to an unnamed Latin American country in the River Plate region during the period of the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and the desaparecidos (“missing”) in Argentina and Chile. It begins as a classic novel of social protest of the 1930s and 1940s in Latin America, but as the work progresses it becomes evident that it has more affinity to the large number of Latin American novels of political exile. The “beloved traitor” of the title is a profesor who is politically disengaged until he is recruited by his activist daughter to participate in a leftist movement, resulting in his imprisonment and torture. After feigning a heart attack, he goes into political exile in Sweden. His daughter marries and rears a child in Finland, and she is the narrator of this novel. In a postmodern turn at the novel’s end, the narrator suggests that the entire story might just be an act of her imagination, based on reading her father’s papers. The novel also becomes overtly political in its focus, for the professor is tormented by the fact that he broke under the pressure of torture, leading to the torture of others. In the end this book is critical of both the left and the right, thus questioning the recent political alignments in Latin America, but particularly the acute politization of the extreme left and the extreme right in Cuba.

Veiga, José J. [Biography] Short story writer, novelist, and journalist, he is known in Brazil as an allegorical writer who offers statements about the human condition. Born in Corumbá (state of Goiás) in 1915, he studied law before embarking on a career in radio and literature. His fiction often portrays bored characters who suffer attempting to tolerate the mediocrity of everyday existence. In his novel A Hora dos Ruminantes (1966, The Three Trials of Manirema), a foreign group takes control of a town through intimidation and fear. His volume of short stories A Máquina Extraviada (1968, The Misplaced Machine and Other Stories) appeared in English translation.

Verbitsky, Bernardo [Biography] Argentine novelist who was born in 1907 and died in 1979, he is known as one of Argentina’s most accomplished social realists. In many of his novels, he fictionalizes the experience of the working class in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and 1940s. His novel Un noviazgo (1956, An engagement) describes the decline of the working class under the 1930s military dictatorship in Argentina. In Villa miseria también es América (1957, Shanty town also is America) he portrays the South American continent suffering a spiritual crisis.

Veríssimo, Erico [Biography] Author of over thirty books, he was best known in Brazil as a regionalist novelist who situated himself as a witness for political rights and freedom of expression. He was born in Cruz Alta, Brazil, in 1905 and died in 1975, leaving behind a legacy as one of Brazil’s major novelists of the century. He also began writing journalism in the 1930s and continued actively in journalism throughout much of his life. After publishing the regionalist novel Clarissa (Clarissa) in 1933, he used urban settings in the novels Caminhos Cruzados (1935, Crossed paths) and Olhai os Lirios do Campo (1938, Look at the flowers in the field); in the last two works he began exploring the use of techniques associated with the Anglo-American and European modernist novel. He published a trilogy of novels over a three-year period under the title O Tempo e o Vento (The time and the wind, appearing in 1949, 1951, and 1952), broadly conceived historical novels that tell a family saga over several centuries, set in the region of Rio Grande do Sul from 1745 to 1945. In the 1960s he changed his geographical and thematic focus entirely, moving his fiction to Washington, DC in O Senhor Embaixador (1965, Mr. Ambassador) and Vietnam in O Prisionero (1967, The prisoner). Veríssimo used humor and satire in his return to a Brazilian setting with Incidente em Antares (1971, The incident in the Antares).

Veríssimo, Luis Fernando [Biography] Brazilian novelist, short fiction writer, playwright, and journalist, he has made a career as a journalist and television scriptwriter. Born in 1936 in Brazil, he is known in that country as a journalist with a regular column in several major newspapers and a humorous chronicler of urban life. He is also an amateur saxophonist. In recent years he has become increasingly noteworthy as a novelist. O Clube dos Anjos (1998, The Club of Angels) is a crime novel about ten men who suffer from gluttony, although the novel can be read as a text on gastronomy as cultural pleasure. Borges e os Orangotangos Eternos (2000, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans) is both a detective story and a parody of the genre of the detective story; in it the narrator-protagonist (self-declared unreliable narrator) tells of his role in a crime in Buenos Aires, where he attends a conference with the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges.

Vilela, Luiz [Biography] Brazilian short story writer, journalist, and novelist, he has published several volumes of widely recognized experimental short fiction in Brazil. He is also considered a master of the dialogue and portraying problems of communication. Born in Ituiutaba (state of Minas Gerais) in 1942, he went to Minas Gerais at the age of fifteen. He studied philosophy before becoming involved with the avant-garde short story magazine Estória in 1963 as well as working with the journal Texto; both organs promoted experimental fiction. He has worked as an editor and reporter for the newspaper Jornal da Tarde. Vilela began writing in his adolescence and moved to São Paulo in 1968, traveling to Europe in 1969. He has also lived in the United States, receiving a fellowship to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 1973 the founded the small press Editora Libertade. He gained recognition in Brazil for his first volume of short stories, Tremor de Terra (Earthquake), which was awarded a prestigious literary prize, the Prêmio Nacional de Ficção, in 1956. Among his other volumes of short stories are the titles No Bar (1968, In the bar), Tarde da Noite (1970, Late at night), O Fim de Tudo (1973, The end of everything), Contos Escolhidos (1978, Selected stories), Lindas Pernas (1979, Beautiful legs), Uma Seleção de Contos (1986, A selection of stories), Os Melhores Contos de Luiz Vilela (1988, The best stories by Luis Vilela).

Villoro, Juan [Biography] Mexican novelist, journalist, and short story writer. Born in Mexico City in 1956, he has not been associated with the group in Mexico identified as the Generación del Crack, but he is, nevertheless, one of the most accomplished writers of his generation. He has been a visiting professor at Yale University and a cultural journalist in Mexico City. He became known first in Mexico as a short story writer and has also written a volume of chronicles, Palmeras de la brisa rápida (1989, Palms of fast breeze).

His first novel, El disparo de Aragón (1991, The shot of Aragon), is easy to associate with the American spy thriller, although Villoro’s success in using this genre has been questioned in Mexico. A first-person narrator tells a love story about Mónica, although it never becomes clear exactly what degree of interest Mónica might have in the protagonist. The narrator, Fernando Balmes, is a bumbling thirty-six-year-old retina surgeon who grew up in the San Lorenzo neighborhood of Mexico City and has difficulty organizing his life. The plot is intriguing: Antonio Suarez is mysteriously missing and the ambitious doctor Iniestra is secretly involved in black-market organ trade. The light tone is one of the novel’s numerous successes, as are the descriptions of the urban spaces of Mexico City. Near the end it becomes evident that Villoro has interests that go beyond simply constructing a good plot for a spy thriller, for he sets forth a point of view that underlines the fragile, shifting, and postmodern quality of contemporary life in a Mexico City where all its inhabitants are living, in effect, under siege.

Viñas, David [Biography] Argentine novelist, poet, short story writer, literary critic, and essayist, he is a major intellectual figure in Latin America in this century. Born in 1929, he belongs to a generation of Argentine writers who have been critical of the Perón dictatorship, the Argentine oligarchy, and most of the nation’s institutions. They were called the generation of the parricides and their work began appearing in the 1950s; their revisionist attitudes distinguished them from their contemporaries. In Viñas’s work commonly used concepts of Argentine history are questioned, and his critique includes many aspects of Argentine life that conventional citizens consider the essence of what it means to be Argentine.

The fiction of Viñas and his generation tended to be neorealistic, revealing an interest in attempting to portray the nation “as it really was.” He has been a prolific writer; his early work Los años despiadados (1956, The pitiless years) is the story of a young boy who feels imprisoned by the restrictions of his conventional, middle-class family. His best friend, an immigrant, on the other hand, seems freer to act as a proletarian peronista. The author makes his point by comparing the two characters, and he uses a similar method in Los dueños de la tierra (1959, The lords of the earth), which begins with a lengthy historical overview of those who own land in Argentina and tells the story of the frontier movement of conquering and settling the land in the Patagonia region. Near the end of the novel Viñas introduces a schoolteacher with progressive ideas as a counterbalance to the exploiters and the traditionalists.

His most accomplished novels, according to most critics, are Cayó sobre su rostro (1955, He fell on his face) and Los hombres de a caballo (1967, The men on horseback). One of Viñas’s several targets of questioning in Cayó sobre su rostro is General (later President) Julio A. Roca, the “Conquerer of the Desert.” He is a legendary figure in Argentina because of his campaign against the Indians of Patagonia in 1879. He is linked to the violence and dishonesty associated with the campaign. The novel is an example of Viñas’s militant debunking, and he uses of multiple points of view to enhance the story and give it a human dimension within the larger historical context. His later work, Los hombres de a caballo, contains both regionalist and cosmopolitan features and represents a continuation of the author’s skeptical attitudes toward Argentine history.

Virgen de los sicarios, La (1994, The virgin of the hit men, by Fernando Vallejo. Written in Spanish and untranslated. Bogotá: Alfaguara, 1994) [Novel] The most widely read and acclaimed novel by one of Colombia’s most accomplished writers after Gabriel García Márquez, this work is set in Medellín, Colombia, the center of drug trafficking and related violence in the 1980s and 1990s. The narrator-protagonist, Fernando, is a Colombian of one of the city’s respected upper-middle-class families who returns to Medellín after an extended stay abroad. Given his status as a gay intellectual, Fernando finds himself in conflict with his family, which espouses traditional conservative values. The family lives a social life centered on the Catholic Church; Fernando lives in the community of gays and sicarios (lower-class paid gunslingers). The novel relates Fernando’s memory of the stable and secure world of his grandparents, which contrasts with the decentered and violent world in which he lives with the young gays and sicarios, or hit men, of Medellín. Fernando also suffers conflicts related to love and violence. Vallejo parodies many of the well-known official discourses of the government and the Catholic Church as part of his biting satire of the Colombian establishment in Medellín and the region of Antioquia, one of the most deeply entrenched in centuries-long tradition and conservative values.

Volpi, Jorge [Biography] Mexican novelist and essayist, he is widely recognized in Mexico as a leader of the self-described generation of the crack that was popularized in Spain and Mexico in 1996 and 1997. Born in Mexico City in 1968, he belongs to the generation of writers that became visible in the 1990s and have attempted to “crack” open the sacred cows of Mexican literature, thus creating new possibilities for fiction in Mexico and Latin America. As such, he is one of the leading figures of the generation of the 1990s in Latin American in general. He has made numerous public statements about the state of modern and postmodern international culture and literature and is often cited in the international press in Mexico and Spain. He has claimed, for example, that the genre of the novel is not in danger of disappearing, but of becoming banal. Rejecting the trend toward “light” and commercial literature that was prominent in Mexico in the 1990s, he has argued that novels should be searches for knowledge. Indeed, his fiction tends to be encyclopedic pieces full of diverse ranges of knowledge, including Western European history and esoteric science; they are the products of research. He writes complex novels that are highly respected among writers and intellectuals in Mexico.

Volpi studied law and literature at the National University in Mexico City (UNAM), and he completed a doctorate in Hispanic philology at the University of Salamanca in Spain. He writes regularly in the cultural organs Letras libres, Viceversa, and Letra Internacional. He has published a lengthy essay that constitutes an intellectual history of 1968 in Mexico, La imaginación y el poder (1998, Imagination and power). He began publishing novels in the early 1990s with A pesar del oscuro silencio (1992, In spite of the dark silence), which was based on research in literary criticism, and has continued publishing fiction since then. In this novel a first-person narrator named Jorge researches the life of Jorge Cuesta, a poet and essayist of the 1920s avant-garde in Mexico. An enigmatic figure, he collaborated with the literary group that published the magazine Contemporáneos in Mexico, suffered numerous professional and personal crises, and eventually died in a psychiatric hospital in 1942, perhaps as a suicide. Volpi operates on a fine line between biography and fiction. Eventually, the narrator realizes that his life is following patterns similar to those of the insane poet he is researching and writing about. Volpi’s most ambitious novel of the 1990s was El temperamento melancólico (1996, The melancholy temperament), a psychological analysis in which the author constructs several levels of plot overlap involving a film, a painting, and the novel. His novel Sanar tu piel amarga (1997, Heal your skin) portrays couples involved in love triangles, with computers part of the scheme for matching couples.

Volpi is best known for his internationally acclaimed and prize-winning novel En busca de Klingsor (1999), a spy novel and intellectual game set toward the end of WWII Germany that appeared in English under the title In Search of Klingsor. Based on research in quantum mechanics and game theory, it was awarded the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1999. In this work Volpi recounts the story of a military intelligence operation. The young protagonist loses his position as a physicist at Princeton University over a love affair, so his mentor, who is German, recommends him for a mission in Germany during WWII: he is assigned to discover the identity of Hitler’s main scientific consultant—the man behind everything from the Nazi biological experimentation to the research for the atomic bomb. Thus, the progatonist, whose name is actually Francis Bacon, gains a connection to a German mathematician named Links and immediately falls in love with a German woman, Irene, his assistant in this special research project. The plot becomes complex as Irene turns out to be an operative for Russian intelligence, and the Russians suspect that Links is Klingsor. These events take place right after WWII, beginning in 1946, but Links is the novels’s narrator in 1989, the week the Berlin Wall falls.

Wacquez, Mauricio [Biography] Chilean novelist, short story writer, essayist, and academic, he dedicated a lifetime to innovation and experimentation with fiction. Born in 1939, he taught philosophy at the Universidad de Chile, the Universidad de Habana, and La Sorbonne. He settled permanently in Calaceite, Spain, in 1972, and lived the remainder of his life in Spain, where he worked in publishing houses and did translations from the French. In the 1980s he published essays in newspapers and magazines in Spain such as La Vanguardia defending humanistic values of tolerance and writing against hardline politics of either the left or the right. He died in Spain in 2000.

Wacquez began publishing fiction in the early 1960s with the volume of short stories Cinco y una ficciones (1963, Five and one fictions) and later published short fiction under the title Excesos (1971, Excesses). He was among the avant-garde of experimental novelists in Chile when he published his novels Toda la luz del mediodía (1965, All the midday light) and Paréntesis (1975, Parenthesis). His other novels included Frente a un hombre armado (1981, In front of an armed man) and Ella o el sueño de nadie (1983, She or the dream of no one). His last novel to appear was Epifanía de una sombra (2001, Epiphany for a shadow), the first volume of an unfinished trilogy titled Trilogía de la oscuridad (Trilogy of darkness). It is an autobiographical novel about the author’s adolescence in Santiago—recreating the experience of growing up on a vineyard among the nation’s elite.

Walcott, Derek [Biography] Caribbean poet, novelist, essayist, and short story writer, Walcott was born in 1930 in Castries, St. Lucia. A Nobel laureate, he is best known as a playwright and poet. He has been working in theater since the 1950s and has been publishing poetry since the 1960s.

His experimental work Omeros (1990) can be read as a book-length poem or as an innovative novel. In this work Walcott assumes four fictious identities as novelist, autobiographer, playwright, and poet. Omeros is an adaption of the Greek for Homer; this protagonist appears as a St. Lucian fisherman and an East Asian shaman as well as a variety of other characters who might drift through the Caribbean from all continents. In this ambitious and wide-ranging work Walcott covers topics such as spiritual alientation, exile, racism, and class conflict. He sees all these matters as they relate to the centuries-old colonial heritage of the Caribbean region.

Walsh, Rodolfo [Biography] Argentine novelist who was born in 1927 in the province of Río Negro and died in 1977, he was a prolific writer. His work as a fiction writer, journalist, and playwright has been increasingly recognized since his disappearance on March 24, 1977, during the military dictatorship. In the 1940s he worked as a copy editor and translator of detective fiction in Buenos Aires. He began writing fiction in the early 1950s, and in 1953 he published a pioneering anthology of detective fiction as well as the volume of short stories Variaciones en rojo (Variations in red). His interest in detective fiction and some of the stylistic nuances of his fiction link him to Jorge Luis Borges. He has also worked in theater and published the plays La Granada (1965, The grenade) and La batalla (1965, The battle). His books of fiction and testimonio include, in addition to Variaciones en rojo, the volumes of short stories Los oficios terrestres (1965, Earthly professions), Un kilo de oro (1967, A kilo of gold), ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969, Who killed Rosendo?); Un oscuro día de justicia (1973); and El caso Satanowsky (1973).

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966, by Jean Rhys. Written in English. New York: Norton, 1982) [Novel] One of the major novels of Caribbean women’s writing, it deals with women who are victims of the colonial legacy. Rhys reinvents the past of a character considered insane, but the author explores the way in which the colonial environment is significant to the protagonist Antoinette’s psychological state, as is her mother’s indifference to her. The destructive relationship between mother and daughter is the basis for the plot. After Antoinette marries, she is rejected by her husband because of her race. Part Spanish and part French, she is less desired because of her mulatto status. In the last part of the novel she searches for and establishes a connection with her mother that had always been lacking. Antoinette also finds a way to accept herself as the racial being that she is. Rhys’s novel is an in-depth exploration of race and gender in the Caribbean.

Women novelists [Topic] Women’s writing in Latin America has been prominent since the early 1980s, but women have had a literary presence in the region throughout the twentieth century. Women have consistently addressed issues directly related to the colonial legacy in Latin America: racism as rooted in the European attitudes toward indigenous groups in the Americas upon their arrival, racism that began with the African slave trade, gender issues that were inherited from the patriarchal society established by the colonizers from Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, and Holland.

Laura Esquivel, Isabel Allende, Angeles Mastretta, Marcela Serrano, and Laura Restrepo have been highly visible commercial women writers, popular in Europe, the United States, and Latin America in recent years. Indeed, Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) .and Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits) were among the most widely read novels of the century in Latin America. Among many scholars and critics of women writers in the post-WWII period, however, more substantive novels have been written by novelists such as the Brazilian Clarice Lispector and the Mexicans Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, and Elena Garro. Garro’s novel Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963, Memories of the future) has been described as one of the early texts of magical realism and shares several characteristics of the novels of the 1960s Boom, which did not include any women writers. In recent years Garro has been increasingly recognized in Mexico as a major writer who had been ignored for most of her writing career.

Brazil and the Caribbean region both have a strong tradition of women writing. Brazil is the nation with the strongest tradition in Latin America of women novelists, from Clarice Lispector to Nélida Piñón, including such practitioners as Lygia Fagundes Telles, Alice Barroso, Patrícia Bins, and Márcia Denser. Lispector wrote from the 1940s to the 1970s, and her work has been amply translated into English and other languages. Caribbean women writers often address the fragmentation that results from their relationship to African and European cultures, and novelists who write in English and articulate these concerns are Zee Edgell (Belize), Merle Hodge (Trinidad), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), Paule Marshall (Barbardos), Jean Rhys (Dominica), and Sylvia Wynter (Jamaica). Haiti’s Edwidge Danticat also writes in English, and the major women novelists of the French Caribbean are Maryse Condé, Maurice Chauvet, Simone Scharz-Bart, Myriam Vieyra, Michèle Lacrosil, and Myotte Capecia. Suriname’s Astrid Roemer writes in Dutch of her experience as a Caribbean woman of African descent and now lives in the Netherlands.

Wynter, Sylvia [Biography] Jamaican novelist, playwright, and essayist, she was born in Holguín, Cuba, in 1928 of Jamaican parents. She was educated in London, where she studied Spanish and promoted indigenous West Indian drama. Her play Under the Sun (1962) was developed into the novel Hills of Hebron (1962). She has written essays in favor of a Caribbean African-based culture.

Yáñez, Agustín [Biography] Mexican novelist and essayist, he was born in Guadalajara in 1904. He studied law in Guadalajara, receiving his degree in 1929. He was involved with Mexico’s innovative avant-garde literary movements and editor of the important literary magazine Bandera de Américas, whose mission was to recognize and promote the modern, the cosmopolitan, and the universal of Mexican letters. Yáñez eventually moved to Mexico City, where he taught literature and aesthetics at the National University (UNAM). He is known as the author of one of the modern classics of the Mexican novel, Al filo del agua (1947, The Edge of the Storm), publishing six novels in the course of his writing career as well as some autobiographical pieces. His historical research resulted in the publication of studies on Mexican historical figures such as Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Justo Sierra, and José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. He spent much of his life involved in public service, serving as governor to his native state of Jalisco from 1953 to 1959 and later as secretary of education in the cabinet of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. He died in 1980.

Yañez Cossio, Alicia [Biography] Ecuadorian novelist, poet, short story writer, and professor of literature, she is the leading contemporary woman writer from this nation. Born in 1929 in Quito, she was educated at the Sacred Hearts Catholic School. She received a scholarship to study journalism in Madrid. Her early writing consisted of poetry, her first collection of poems entitled Luciolas (1949).

Yáñez Cossío appeared as a novelist on the literary scene in the early 1970s, winning a national literary prize for her first novel Bruna, soroche y los tíos (1971, Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City). In this novel Bruna is a young girl raised by uncles in a highland area where the soroche, a type of altitude sickness unique to the Andes, kills off the older generation. The novel refers to several classic motifs of magical realism. In La casa del sano placer (1989, The house of healthy pleasure) she uses a bordello as the focus of her critique of government and religious institutions; she also contemplates ways in which to collaborate. The grand dame who operates the bordello soon has it competing with the town’s other institutions. By questioning the conventional norms of Ecuador, Yañez Cossío subverts some of the nation’s most venerable institutions. An indicator of her importance in Ecuador is the fact that the province of Pichincha holds a yearly literary prize for women authors named for her. In 1997 she won the prestigious Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz for her novel El cristo feo (1996, The ugly Christ). She is a member of the National Academy of the Language in Ecuador.

Zapata, Luis [Biography] Mexican novelist and screenwriter, he is widely recognized as one of the foremost exponents of gay themes in the Mexican novel. Zapata was born in 1951 in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. His youth was marked by cinema and his early writing was fiction and screenplays. He studied French language at the National University in Mexico City (UNAM). Zapata is known as a polemic author who crosses many social boundaries in his writing. He has offended many conventional Mexican readers with his intimate descriptions of gay sex and his use of gay language. Zapata uses a mixture of writing styles in order to present a variety of Mexican homosexual personalities and situations.

His best-known novel, El vampiro de la colonia Roma (1979, Adonis García), won a national prize in Mexico, the Premio Grijalbo, and was later translated into English. His third novel, De pétalos perennes (1981, Perenniel petals), was adapted to film by the film director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. In this three-part novel, La más fuerte pasión (1995, The strongest passion), Zapata constructs a fiction around two male characters, the entire novel consisting of a dialogue between the two. The pair spends a few months in Houston, then Mexico City, and the third part transpires upon their return to Houston. They resolve differences and interests and eventually decide to remain together. In Siete noches junto al mar (1999, Seven nights by the sea) Zapata again exercises his abilities at forming a novel out of dialogue. The four protagonists, Ivan, Fernando, Lucia, and Nidia, portray Mexican society in a manner that highlights both its grotesque and intimately quotidian aspects. The protagonists endure seven nights without television, where they entertain themselves by telling stories.

Zapata Olivella, Manuel [Biography] Colombian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist, he has been a major exponent of Afro-Colombian culture; in the latter half of his career he gained international recognition for his work. He was active on the Colombian intellectual scene from the late 1940s to the 1990s, and he is known as a social critic. He was born in Lorica, a small town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia (department of Córdoba) in 1920 and grew up in this town on the Sinú River, an area historically populated by Arawak-Carib Indians and later by African slaves brought by the Spaniards to work in the agricultural and mining industries. From his childhood Zapata Olivella heard the myths and tales of oral tradition, as passed down through indigenous and African traditions. When he was seven years old his family moved to the city of Cartagena, and he was educated in Cartagena and later in Bogotá, where he completed studies in medicine.

Zeta Acosta, Oscar [Biography] Novelist and short story writer, he was a pioneer in developing a Chicano novelistic aesthetic in the early 1970s. He was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1935 and studied law in California in the mid-1960s. During a trip in northern Mexico in 1974 he disappeared. His writings promoted ethnic identity, rejected the established order, and identified with the working class, all of which later became commonplace in U.S. Hispanic literature of the 1980s and 1990s. His representation of the U.S. he experienced as well as his critique of it were marked by humor. His two novels are fictionalized, “false” autobiographies.

Zink, Rui [Biography] Brazilian novelist, Zink is known as a writer who has reacted against much of the experimental and postmodern fiction of Brazil, writing that he considers an importation from Europe, particularly from France. He, on the other hand, has written a series of works with the strong plots and accessibility of popular American fiction. He also likes to associate himself with such writers as Swift and Montesquieu. In addition to his allusions to American fiction, he writes with full awareness of popular film in the United States. His novel Apocalipse Nau (1996) mimics the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.

His is novel Hotel Lusitano (Hotel Lusitano) originally published in 1987, has two young American men as the main characters, an aspiring novelist who serves as narrator and a novice painter who is his roommate. The narrator recounts their trip to Europe, which eventually leads them to an extended stay in Portugal. They stay in Lisbon, where they meet an artist and his girlfriend. The four develop strong personal bonds (including sexual relationships) and spend a considerable portion of the novel drinking, consuming drugs, and talking about Portugal. Their lengthy analysis of the country leads them to the conclusion that it is a soft-core nation. Later, the narrator is arrested upon entering the U.S. for the possession of drugs and sent to prison, where he contemplates writing a novel with similar plot and characters, only set in Rio de Janeiro. He also imagines the possibility of it becoming a popular movie.

Zurita, Raúl [Biography] Chilean poet and novelist born in Santiago in 1950, he was associated with Chile’s underground writing of resistence in the 1980s during the military dictatorship. Known most widely as an irreverent poet, he has also published fiction. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he studied civil engineering in Valparaíso. In the 1970s he began publishing poetry and has published five books. He is known in Chile and Latin America for his public performances; in 1982 he wrote a poem in the sky in New York. He was the cultural attaché of Chile in Italy from 1990 to 1994. His first novel was El día más blanco (1999, The whitest day).