Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

This anthology offers an original selection of very short short stories written by contemporary Latin American authors. This narrative genre is characterized by a building up of suspense within the briefest possible extension. Humor is often present in the form of irony or parody. Each text demands an attentive reader and a capacity to be led away by surprising-or even disconcerting-events or situations.

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Library Journal Review

Readers from many countries will appreciate this new anthology from a consortium of publishers representing every Spanish-speaking country in the Americas and Brazil. The 59 stories are a mix of old favorites and new works, and the authors include big names such as Eduardo Galeano, Augusto Monterroso, and Cristina Peri Rossi, as well as lesser known authors. The emphasis here is on truly short stories. None is longer than three pages, and some are a mere paragraph or two. True to the Latin American tradition, many of the narratives tend toward magical realism. The stories are quite varied in tone and impact: a man boards a suburban train and finds himself transported through the "stations" of his life; a 16th-century missionary tries to outsmart his Mayan captors, not suspecting their scientific knowledge is greater than his; the origin of our species reveals itself when a group of peaceful monkeys, forced out of the trees by their aggressive cousins, must learn to walk upright in their new habitat. Some of the stories simply revel in the possibilities of fantasy, as when a man falls in a coffee cup and is swallowed by his grandmother, or a regular newspaper reader finds himself slowly transformed into a newspaper. There is enough variety here to satisfy everyone. Libraries with diverse Hispanic populations will welcome a good anthology that helps with school assignments that begin, "I have to read something by an author from...."ÄMark Hall, San Francisco P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

School Library Journal Review

Gr 9 Up-This carefully selected anthology "constitutes a sampling of the best contemporary writing of Latin America." It is mainly comprised of brief (in some cases, very brief) examples of "fantastic fiction," where "events do not necessarily follow an externally imposed chronological order." Other selections are related to "elements of this world that break away from established order: space, time, causality, inexplicable elements, and absurdities."-Jose Ruiz Alvarez, The Ferguson Library, Stamford, CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.