Forbidden love was a forbidden topic. Decorum was everything—in society, where Catholicism dictated the terms, and in literature, where a code of decency governed writers and readers alike. To women were left the pale love stories that conducted appropriate partners in proper settings to socially acceptable outcomes. So it was in Latin America well into the twentieth century.
The stories in this volume announce a dramatic change, a transformation of the literature of love in Latin America, and of the role—even the nature—of women in this most “feminine” literary tradition. These stories, by exciting new writers as well as by the renowned, are “violations” of the most exhilarating sort, flouting conventions of language, behavior, subject matter, and style to remake and widen our once-narrow view of the literary landscape of Latin America. Here women writers from Mexico and Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, Cuba, Peru, and Uruguay break social, religious, political, and sexual barriers in fiction that is by turns erotic, satirical, shocking, tragic—and always, in its remapping of literary boundaries, deeply and richly entertaining.
