Authors From Argentina

"Shua is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed flash fiction writers. We see this first in her publication of La sueñera in 1984 and then non-stop with collections such as Casa de Geishas (1992) and Fenómenos de circo (2011; published in English as Without a Net, Hanging Loose Press, 2012). Several such collections have been published in Madrid in one volume, Cazadores de Letras (2009). In her flash fictions we see a creative talent who seeks constantly challenges of form and content. Shua is the product of her time and place; in her flash fictions we hear idioms specific to a Buenos Aires argentinidad (Argentine-ness), for instance. Yet, she’s restless, carefully crafting flash fictional worlds that transcend time and place. She never accepts the inertia formulaic solutions and representations. In her flash fictions we travel from the mundane to the metaphysical, from the ugly to the sublime. We are made privy to the power play within family units and between lovers. In her collection Microfictions, for instance, we encounter inanimate objects like blow dryers with interior states—a refrigerator that softly purrs at night “in heat for its mate” and a statue that “smiles impassively, somewhat amazed as she admires the perfection of the sculptor, her creation”. She wraps language around her finger (every word counts) to offer her readers a penetrating look into what makes us tick—and what makes reality glisten. Whether her characters are old, young, women, men, animals, objects and the like, she invests them with complex thinking, desiring, and dreaming subjectivities. Shua’s incisive quick visions—gestalts—make constantly new our experience of the world. It is from the Americas and with Shua’s flash fictions at the vanguard that we see the radical transformation of our planetary republic of letters."

"The flash fiction genre allows me to concentrate the maximum possible meaning in the minimum possible signifier, and I love this. It has strong links with poetry and it is narrative at the same time. It has everything in such a short length! It is a great pleasure for me to transform an idea —a stone, say— into a brilliant gem in a single day. And if everything fails, if the stone cannot be made into a jewel, I can throw it away in a few hours, instead of suffering for years as happens with writing a novel. Today’s poetry is too mysterious for me. It is too hermetic. At times my flash fictions can seem difficult to read, but they always provide the necessary keys to unlock their respective meanings."

"What is literature? How can you explain it? Why do writers write? Why do readers read? It is not enough to know. We want to understand. If knowing and knowledge were our main and only concern, art would have never come to exist. We would have science and maybe journalism… But we are not satisfied with simple information about what happened. We need more than an anecdote. We need a story that gives shape and meaning to the confusing chaos of life. Our minds need an order that does not exist in real life."

"I try to catch pieces from the chaos of reality and shape them in the small and fake and necessary cosmos of fiction."

"it doesn’t matter how short a short story is, it must contain a happening in time that alters the state of things. This is the only way to tell a story."

"I love to play with words and meanings and to make somersaults with them. In the encounter with my fictions, I would like my readers to experience more than just reflection. I would hope they trigger in the readers their own capacity to imagine and play with all the possibilities of language."

"Ethics and aesthetics are just the same in art; or at least they are integrated in a complex way."

"Variety is my device. Each of my texts must startle the reader one way or another. I think that is one of the tasks literature must accomplish: to never let the reader feel really confortable."

"A good translation must bring to the reader not only the meaning of the text, but also to its music —its rhythms."

"Savage capitalism and globalization finished in the 1990s what dictatorship started in the 1970s. State policy favored big business that sought to seize the local markets."

"I was proud of our cultural level in Argentina. It was our way of breathing and resistance and suddenly we were forced to avoid reality by choosing every word with concern."

"Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been made: that's what God heard before creating the world, when there was nothing yet. I have also heard that one, he may have answered from the old, split Nothingness. And then he began."

"Todo se ha escrito, todo se ha dicho, todo se ha hecho, oyó Dios que le decían y aún no había creado el mundo, todavía no había nada. También eso ya me lo han dicho, repuso quizá desde la vieja, hendida Nada. Y comenzó."

"I learned to write reading North American literature, I love your literature, but I have this feeling that if a country only reads its own literature, it will run out of oxygen."

"In the moment you decide to publish, you hand them off. But it’s interesting how certain stories have remained present—how some were published over and over in different languages, which meant they always seemed close by, and I would change little things here or there."

"Home belongs to the family. It’s not a place you chose, it’s more of an imposed space, arbitrary—a space whose rules you don’t entirely understand."

"Woman's greatest ideal is a life without work or responsibility - yet who leads such a life but a child? A child with appealing eyes, a funny little body with dimples and sweet layers of baby fat and clear, taut skin - that darling miniature of an adult. It is a child that woman imitates - its easy laugh, its helplessness, its need for protection. A child must be cared for; it cannot look after itself And what species does not, by natural instinct, look after its offspring? It must - or the species will die out. With the aid of skillfully applied cosmetics, designed to preserve that precious baby look; with the aid of helpless, appealing babble and exclamations such as 'Ooh' and 'Ah' to denote astonishment, surprise, and admiration; with inane little bursts of conversation, women have preserved this 'baby look' for as long as possible so as to make the world continue to believe in the darling, sweet little girl she once was, and she relies on the protective instinct in man to make him take care of her."

"If a young man gets married, starts a family, and spends the rest of his life working at a soul-destroying job, he is held up as an example of virtue and responsibility. The other type of man, living only for himself, working only for himself, doing first one thing and then another simply because he enjoys it and because he has to keep only himself, sleeping where and when he wants, and facing woman when he meets her, on equal terms and not as one of a million slaves, is rejected by society. The free, unshackled man has no place in its midst."

"I think TV series, games, and general media have changed the way we tell stories. But books will remain. Technology has changed all the others arts: painting, theater, dancing, cinema, music. But literature is an absolutely intimate process between the writer’s voice and the reader’s mind, it is something so natural and strong that the only thing that technology could change is its support, its format, for example, if we read from a book or from an e-reader. But that doesn’t change the heart of literature."