| Jesús
Gardea Mark Schafer, translator
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STRIPPING AWAY THE SORROWS FROM THIS WORLD | ||
STRIPPING
AWAY THE SORROWS FROM THIS WORLD
LOW
/ OUT OF STOCK |
Stories by one of Mexico's finest voices in contemporary
fiction, collected here
for the first time in English. These
stories "grow out of the land Jesús Garcia writes about: the vast, unforgiving
plains and broken-down settlements of the northern part of Mexico.… The
stories are bleak and unforgiving … and the narrative itself is reduced
to short bursts of language.… What lingers and dominates is the raw power
of nature.… Gardea includes subtle ironies and grace notes that are all
his own." Jesús Gardea, northern Mexico's most influential author, is a writer of llanos — the parched northern flatlands — and their eerie stillness infuses the twenty-five stories in this major retrospective of his work. Gardea's is a world of wind and sun, scorching summers and frigid winters, small towns, lonely houses, and empty horizons. It is a harsh, violent world, in which solitary individuals struggle against unforgiving elements and human violence. For Gardea, cruelties of chance are the condition of life. Pursuing absurd activities — moving an unclaimed dresser in a rowboat, clearing a patch of land that nobody wants — his characters could say with Beckett, "I can't go on, I'll go on." But Gardea's taut tales gain power from the unique world in which they are set, the austere world of Mexico's northern plains. |
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Eccentric in a generation of eccentrics, JESÚS GARDEA was born in Delicias, Chihuahua, in 1939. He worked for a few years as a dentist in the north of Mexico. September and Other Days, his second volume of short stories, won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize — one of the most prestigious in Mexico — in 1980. Dedicated to literature, he has written nearly twenty novels and volumes of stories. He lives on the border city of Juárez, Mexico.
MARK SCHAFER, recipient of an NEA grant for translation, is a literary translator and collage artist living in the Boston area. He has translated a wide range of authors in a variety of genres including Alberto Ruy Sánchez and Belén Gopegui (novels), Virgilio Pińera and Jesús Gardea (short stories), Alvaro Mutis and Gloria Gervitz (poetry), and José Lezama Lima and Julio Ortega (essays). |