| The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories Contributor(s): Stavans, Ilan (Author) |
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ISBN: 0810124602 ISBN-13: 9780810124608 Publisher: Northwestern University Press OUR PRICE: $13.46 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: October 2007 Annotation: Haunting and enigmatic, these nine loosely connected stories are evidence of the growing field of Jewish-Latin American fiction. "A Heaven Without Crows", structured as a letter from Kafka to his friend Max Brod, details the labyrinthine paths of his tortured soul. "The Invention of Memory", awarded the Gamma Literature Prize, is also a tribute to Eastern European letters, in which a Czech man with a portentous memory is diagnosed with a deteriorating illness. He travels to Mexico to look for his past and fight against oblivion by carefully staging his vanishing reminiscences. "Three Nightmares" proves that fantasy and reality, people and things, are form-shifting aspects of one another. And the title story is a bizarre tale, a succinct and tangential homage to Felisberto Hernandez's piano narratives and to Oliver Sacks's neurological anecdotes, in which a young woman loses touch with one of her hands. The volume concludes with an autobiographical essay, "Lost in Translation", in which Stavans comments on his experience growing up Jewish in Mexico. Told with wit and precision, these stories are at once a meditation on politics and the imagination in the Hispanic world, compelling allegories on the nature of freedom and individuality, a study of guilt, and a savage satire on the rigorous banality of life. The delicious secrets of Stavans's imagination unfold in these endearing tales with the authority of dreams, questioning our philosophical assumptions and portraying the universe as a vast, mysterious theater where everything is sacred but nothing is absolute. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Short Stories (single Author) |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 2007017827 |
| Physical Information: 0.43" H x 6.14" W x 7.45" (0.54 lbs) 208 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The One-Handed Pianist was published to acclaim in the early 1990's, with the two-part Spanish edition winning the Latino Literature Prize in 1989 and the Gamma Literature Prize in 1992. Its tales look at what it means to be Jewish in the Hispanic world--a world in which spirituality is often exercised outside the realm of orthodoxy. Stavans constructs fables that raise questions about ethnicity and community; even Stavans' person raises questions about ethnicity and community: what does it mean that a Jew of Eastern European lineage can call himself Latino and speak for that group? |