In these short, bilingual stories set in Buenos Aires (with each piece appearing in Spanish and English on facing pages), Alicia Borinsky provides unique glimpses into the lives of the city's inhabitants: its businessmen and tango dancers, politicians and torturers, triumphant divas and discarded children—a gallery of characters from a broad spectrum of contemporary Argentine society. She portrays a world of violence, corruption, love, and betrayal. The brevity of the pieces suggests a breathlessness and ephemeral quality, the fast-paced rhythm of the present. Yet within these small moments flicker the larger forces that shape ordinary lives. Civil wars are fought, shady deals are made, unwanted children are born. And in Borinsky's ironic but life-affirming prose, human foibles are exposed. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

Golpes bajos / Low Blows: Instantáneas / Snapshots (THE AMERICAS)

Literature & Fiction

Borinsky, Alicia

Short Stories & Anthologies

University of Wisconsin Press

What is a woman to do? Mean Woman raises and answers the question time and again. The female characters in the novel rule countries, are oppressed, and rise again individually and in groups. Shifting scenes of Latin American politics are evoked in kaleidoscopic play. Swaggering heroines of tango, the Argentines Eva and Isabelita Perón, the itinerant Filipina Imelda Marcos, and their male consorts may be glimpsed in a vision whose sustained humor dazzles us with the conundrums of violence, machismo, and exile.

Mean Woman / Mina Cruel (Latin American Women Writers)

Humor & Satire

University Of Nebraska Press

Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer takes place in the new “free market” era of personal choices and relations: a chaotic, sometimes hopeful, often comic world that has supplanted the old order of political terror and clearly demarcated ideological divides. The novel’s vaudeville qualities, with characters shuffling on and off the page in rapid succession, are complemented by its exhilarating air of parody. Dreams draws ingeniously upon the sentimentality and ephemera of popular culture—quoting radio and TV shows, song lyrics, newspaper items, and bits of gossip— while also offering a sterner, more nuanced view of public and private relations. It is in large measure this mix of elements—“popular” and “high” culture, sentimentality and political understanding, vaudeville and arch satire—that makes Dreams an exemplary postmodern novel.

Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer: Vaudeville Novel (Latin American Women Writers)

Literary

What is a woman to do? Mean Woman raises and answers the question time and again. The female characters in the novel rule countries, are oppressed, and rise again individually and in groups. Shifting scenes of Latin American politics are evoked in kaleidoscopic play. Swaggering heroines of tango, the Argentines Eva and Isabelita Perón, the itinerant Filipina Imelda Marcos, and their male consorts may be glimpsed in a vision whose sustained humor dazzles us with the conundrums of violence, machismo, and exile.

Mean Woman: Mina Cruel (Latin American Women Writers)

Bison Books

Contemporary

An irreverent picaresque, All Night Movie follows the adventures of a young woman determined to conquer the world. A rogues' gallery of labor union leaders, cultists, lesbians, murderers, ne'er-do-wells, prostitutes, and visitors to a disconcertingly erotic telephone booth accompany the picara as she pushes the limits established in patriarchal postdictatorship Argentina. With lyric prose, Alicia Borinsky creates a hypnotic kaleidoscope of voices--a tantalizing and illuminating mix of the pop culture, politics, sexuality, tango, and cinema of an enigmatic society that celebrates its own demise.

All Night Movie

United States

Northwestern University Press

Alicia Borinsky argues that the contemporary Latin American novel does not just ingeniously dismantle the referential claims of the more traditional novel; it offers a postmodern version of the lessons taught by fiction.
Latin American fiction, perhaps the most inventive literature of recent decades, seems marked by its self-reflexivity, by its playful relationship to history and the everyday, and by its concerns with the ways in which language works. But is it, Borinsky asks, really a literature whose primary goal is to raise metafictional questions about writing and reading? While the effects of this literature include dismantling the illusions of realism, naturalism, and historicism, the haunting and disturbing energy of its major works lies in their capacity of invoke a region beyond literature through literature.
Theoretical Fables progresses by way of close readings of the works of eight canonical—and not quite canonical—Latin American Authors. Borinsky argues that the Latin American "theoretical fable" has its origins in the work of the early twentieth-century Argentinean writer Macedonio Fernández. In this light she studies the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Adolfo Bioy Cesares, Manuel Puig, and Maria Luisa Bombal.

Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical Dream in Contemporary Latin American Literature (Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction)

History & Criticism

University of Pennsylvania Press

Timorous Women

Poetry

Spectacular Diseases

Tango and fairy tales mix freely in this seductive, irreverent, and sensual collection of poems. From a city that is at once Buenos Aires and all others, Alicia Borinsky brings to life reluctant mothers, slightly mad teachers, selfless wives, neighborhood witches, best friends, sworn enemies, torturers, vamps, cheats, and lovers—a gallery of characters who wink and boldly gaze back at us. Vignettes become poems and poems become vignettes, reflections that dance, reveal, conceal, enchant, confess, and dream. Frivolous Women invites us to visit the darker and lighter sides of laughter and love and feel the tenderness of recovered memories as we cross the bridges of relationships and stroll down the mysterious streets of childhood. Alicia Borinsky reminds us that the revelations of poetry are always intimate and dangerous. Cola Franzen’s agile and insightful translation, crafted in close collaboration with the poet, is faithful to the letter and spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition.

Frivolous Women and Other Sinners / Frívolas y pecadoras

Swan Isle Press

In Lost Cities Go to Paradise, poetry breaks into song and poetic prose becomes lively storytelling as Alicia Borinsky raises intimate questions about the fragility of contemporary life. Composed of many layered scenes, unforgettable characters, snapshots, and vignettes, this collection of quick-witted poems and short fiction mixes deceit and conceit with moments of tenderness and the elusive nature of humanity, asking if identity is more than a festival of masks and self-invention. At the center of Borinsky’s work are the cities, which are a masquerade of disaster and spectacle that moves through space and time. Within these cities reside a man with two bills who gives three out of generosity, a woman who hides her face so that she may be better seen, cheating lovers who betray only to end up entwined in a tango, and immigrants who borrow each other’s accents. Filled with energy and irreverence, Lost Cities Go to Paradise captures the indignities and excitement of living among others in a society and discovering what is valued—and all that is not.

Lost Cities Go to Paradise: Las Ciudades Perdidas Van al Paraíso

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Borinsky, Alicia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Borinsky, Alicia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Borinsky, Alicia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Golpes bajos / Low Blows: Instantáneas / Snapshots (THE AMERICAS)

Mean Woman / Mina Cruel (Latin American Women Writers)

Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer: Vaudeville Novel (Latin American Women Writers)

Mean Woman: Mina Cruel (Latin American Women Writers)

Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer: Vaudeville Novel (Latin American Women Writers)

All Night Movie

Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical Dream in Contemporary Latin American Literature (Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction)

Timorous Women

Frivolous Women and Other Sinners / Frívolas y pecadoras

Lost Cities Go to Paradise: Las Ciudades Perdidas Van al Paraíso