The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories (Volume 5) (Chicana and Chicano Visions of the Américas Series) - Hardcover

Anaya, Rudolfo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080613738X ISBN 13: 9780806137384

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006

Synopsis

"I am continually thinking stories," writes Rudolfo Anaya. "Even when I am working on a novel, the images for stories keep coming."

Considered by many to be the founder of modern Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya, best known for Bless Me, Ultima and other novels, has also authored a number of remarkable short stories. Now for the first time, these stories, representing thirty years of Anaya’s writing, have been collected into a single volume. They constitute the best and most essential collection of Anaya’s short story work.

Unlike his novels, which range broadly over the American tapestry, Anaya’s short stories focus on character and ethical questions in a regional setting—from the harsh deserts of the American Southwest and northern Mexico to the lush tropical forests of Uxmal in the Yucatán. These tales demonstrate Anaya’s singular attitude toward fiction: that stories create myths to live and love by. "In the end the story has to speak for itself," Anaya writes. "Its purpose can be studied, but never fully known."

With The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories, the reader ventures deeply into the world of Rudolfo Anaya, a world of magic, mystery, harsh realities, and redemption.

About this title

About the Author

Rudolfo Anaya (1937–2020) was Professor of English at the University of New Mexico and the award-winning author of numerous books, including the classic Bless Me, Ultima. His work earned multiple awards and honors: the Western Writers of America Owen Wister Award (2018), the National Humanities Medal (2015), the National Medal of Arts (2001), the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes (2012), and others. He lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the Southwest inspired his writing throughout his life.

Reviews

Starred Review. This collection of 18 short stories spanning the past 30 years showcases Anaya's literary voice, at once innocent and omniscient, and rooted in the windswept llanos (plains) of New Mexico. Anaya, the award-winning Chicano author (Bless Me, Ultima), masterfully infuses his cuentos, or folktales, with mysticism and spirituality. The title story, for example, encapsulates a rancher's hard-learned lesson about magic. Anaya fluently weaves sensuality with small-town Catholicism in "Iliana of the Pleasure Dreams," about a teenage bride consumed by sexual fantasies. When the face of Christ supposedly appears on the church wall at sunset, she and her shy new husband connect over their inability to see the miracle. In "The Silence of the Llano," the collection's most moving story, the marital bliss of the ranchero Rafael is destroyed when his wife dies in childbirth, and he and his new daughter live separate, isolated lives under the same roof for 16 years, until another tragedy reunites them. "In Search of Epifano" features death as a benign figure, representing not only inevitability but also the resolution of a deep-seated desire unquenchable by anything on earth. Anaya's characters' longing shimmers off elegiac, deceptively simple prose, captivating in its aspiration and achievement. (Mar.)
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Best known for novels like Bless Me, Ultima (1994), New Mexico's native son now presents a collection of short stories spanning 30 years. Considered the founder of Chicano literature, Anaya incorporates Southwestern landscapes into the interiorscapes of his characters. From the brutality of the desert to the silence of barren plains, heartbreak, near madness, and desperation manifest in relationships between husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, loners and members of society's various "tribes." Many stories are mythical, containing elements of faith and magic intertwined with Catholic ritual and Mexican culture. In the preface, Anaya says he wrote these stories when he was called to do so, even during work on a major novel. He is a man not so much haunted as graciously receptive to visitations of the best kind: symbols, images, and threads of story found in the fabric of his imagination, the tapestry of his personal history and culture. Readers will be hard-pressed to resist Anaya's work because of the revelation and redemption it consistently offers. Janet St. John
Copyright Š American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080613738X
• ISBN 13: 9780806137384
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216