This issue of "Grand Street" continues to present the work of writers and artists from around the world. Now diversifying to include scientific and other essays on the state of the planet, dialogues and oral histories, and excerpts of music in score, in addition to fiction and poetry, this quarterly has placed increased emphasis on the visual arts while maintaining its literary focus.

Grand Street 44/No 4

Literature & Fiction

Stein, Jean

Allen, Esther

Contemporary

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Two novellas and four stories, never before translated into English, by the great and too little known Uruguayan master, Felisberto Hernández.Lands of Memory presents a half-dozen wonderful works by one of the greatest yet least-known South American writers of the twentieth century. Felisberto Hernández's extraordinary stories have been always greatly prized by other writers, and the two novellas and four stories collected in Lands of Memory show why. "Lands of Memory" and "In the Times of Clemente Colling" are two dreamlike novellas, which are carried along like pieces of otherworldly music by odd rhapsodic memories. Curiously haunting, the four stories also included in Lands of Memory turn upon small improbable events―small unpredictable, off-the-wall events which turn upside-down a first recital or a salesman's calling. These works have been long overdue for translation into English, and New Directions is pleased to have them in Esther Allen's stunning versions.

Lands of Memory

HERNÁNDEZ, Felisberto

Reference

New Directions

This muscular, starkly impressive novel from Guatemala's premiere young writer fiercely addresses the seemingly endless violence of Latin America. A young man, Juan Luis Luna, is kidnapped in Guatemala City and held at the bottom of a rusty, empty underground fuel tank in an abandoned gas station. The kidnappers demand a ransom; his rich father does not reply. The kidnappers threaten to cut off his son's foot and still hear nothing. They then slice off one of Juan Luis's toes and send it to his father, who still refuses to act. So the next day... The Good Cripple obsessively focused, chilling, allegorical is stunningly explosive. With its enigmatic beginning, however, and its circular relentless structure, the novel is also dense with ideas: can one be whole after mutilation? Can the injured transcend violence? Rodrigo Rey Rosa's style is of a lithe pristine clarity, but beneath that calm surface cruelty, revenge, and diffidence churn darkly away. The Good Cripple is an astonishingly intense book, and as unforgettable as the sight of "the place where the foot had been severed, where a circle of red flesh, now a little black along the edges, could be seen, with a concentric circle of white bone that was both milky and glassy..."

The Good Cripple

Rey Rosa, Rodrigo

United States

In the Mexican state of Chiapas in the 1930s, poverty, illiteracy, and rage contribute to an uprising among the descendants of the Mayan Indians

The Book of Lamentations

CASTELLANOS,ROSARIO

Marsilio Pub

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