Marco Antonio Samaniego’s Award Winning Novel Available in English Translation

Marco Antonio Samaniego’s Donde las voces se guardan, winner of the 1992 Augustín Yañez award, is now available in English translation from SDSU Press as The Whispering Voices of Atabalpa. Hit the image above to order it right away via Amazon.com (our online distribution lackey!)

The fifth novel in the SDSU Press series “Baja California Literature in Translation," the book centers on La Chueca, the crooked and deformed female. Condemned from birth for her appearance and her inability to cry as a newborn girl ought, La Chueca grows into a woman who flees her small, unforgiving town to experience life, desire and death. 

Following is an excerpt from the novel described by famed Mexican journalist and author Elena Poniatowska as a “great literary effort.” 

From the moment she spied the little clump of flesh, she knew it was deformed, but she said nothing; she kept quiet, not wanting to be accused of having the evil eye. "It’s a girl, it’s a girl!" She ran outside shouting, where the crowd had gathered, gossiping about the slut Vicenta who had gotten involved with the Silerios and stolen the husband of La Manuela, the daughter of the town’s religious zealot. The women crowded in to see her. Her eyes were red and squinty. Her mouth twitched and her skin was the color of the evening sun, The child had hardly cried at all. That’s why the tongues began to wag; she was born during the sofoque: "The child that doesn’t cry is the child that brings evil; the sign of Satan, of the devil, of evil itself."

In Memoriam: Raymond Federman

Brilliant novelist, poet and academic Raymond Federman passed away this week. The news left many shocked and saddened, but also disheartening is how few are familiar with his incredible work.

The man could write novels the equal of Beckett's (and I mean the Irish Nobel winner, not Federman's dalmatian). He could write a charged and evocative poem on the impossibility of putting the "human debacle" onto paper, or a half-insane poem about a potato turning into a tomato. A potato. Turning into a tomato. Now tell me that's not someone you must read.

Still not convinced? Just take a look at this excerpt from the definitive encyclopedia of all things Federman:

Have you ever tried to catch a Federman word on your tongue and hold it still? Force it to respond to your theoretical frame? Since such critical desires distort the Federmaniacal word and since so many Federmanesque writers are possessed by parachutal syntax, we tried to create a form that would perform Federman rather than be simply "about" Federman. Since Federman himself as a wearer of reversible jackets (i.e., a writer) is obsessed with lists, with cataloging, with mapping the terrain of intertextual repetitions (echoes blasted from beyond the thunderdome), (parenthetical digressions) outside the domain of quotation marks, we felt that an organization built on the basic premise of encyclopedia and infested with hypertextual hot bottoms would come closest to providing readers with their own Federman experience.

- Doug Rice, "Before Beginning" From Federman A to X-X-X-X: A Recyclopedic Narrative

I mean, come on.

It's quite a blow, losing Federman, and friends and fans around the world are mourning. Let's work to ensure a new generation discovers and falls in love with the work of this one-of-a-kind author.

To visit Federman's personal website, click here, and for his blog, click here.

To take a closer look at Federman, A to X-X-X-X, quoted above, click here.