Customer Reviews

Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America

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I am putting together a syllabus for a summer course in contemporary Latino literature and was highly disappointed to find that this book did not provide diversity in writing - eg the only Puerto Rican included was Coefer - whose piece entitled "volar" was beautiful but a wopping 2 pages short. Most pieces in this collection are riddled with cursing, sex, negative imagery - the same old same old internalized crap .... and I need to offer my students much more than that!

I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers group and was impressed by the interesting form and the variety of authors. It's a collection of 'sudden' or short-short fiction (with pieces ranging from a couple of hundred words to a few pages; this is a subgenre the editors refer to as 'flash' fiction in their similarly brief introduction) and I can imagine the book lending itself to various uses... 1) It could be a fun addition to a college literature course, as it offers brief morsels by well-known and also newer writers. It might also be useful to teachers since each selection is short enough to be read, silently or aloud, during even the shortest class session, still leaving ample time for lecture, discussion, or other activities. 2) The book might also work nicely (as another LibraryThing reviewer noted) for commuters. A person might as well enjoy a quick bit of brain candy while sitting on or waiting for that subway car, bus or train. To make work readable in such a setting, and given that this is already such a short form to boot, the authors need to create a rich and intriguing microcosm by a very careful use of words, and many of these do. Finally, 3) if one is a fan of certain contributors and their longer writing, this collection might make a good gift for friend who hasn't yet had an introduction to those authors or their longer works. The super-short form works well for little glimpses of anything from 'magical realism' to postmodernism, and a collection like this one might hook a reader's imagination enough to make them hungry for a full-sized meal.

Borges' "The Book of Sand," Rudolfo Anaya's "The Native Lawyer," Roberto Bolano's "The Phone Call" and Ana Castillo's "The Foreign Market" were memorable for me; Antonio Farias' " Red Serpent Ceviche" made me excited to pick up his first novel, and Ana Maria Shua's "3 Microstories" made me want to track down the rest of her work, including a film adaptation.

In short, this seems a satisfying collection overall, and particularly well-suited for students, commuters, and the curious.