The Mirror of Lida Sal
By Nobel Laureate Miguel Angel AsturiasTranslated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
ISBN: 0-935480-83-8
Price: $15.00
Pages: 146
A never-before translated collection of stories based on Mayan myth and Guatemalan folklore by the 1967 Novel Laureate Miguel Angel Asturias. In these delightful tales, the father of magic realism, best known for his novels The President, Mulata, and Men of Maize, displays his dazzling deftness with fiction in short form. These brilliantly inventive adaptations of Guatemalan folk tales intermesh the technical virtuosity, incomparable imagination and profound poetic vision of a giant of twentieth century literature.
Hailed as the direct forebear of such authors as Gabriel García Marquez and Luisa Valenzuela, Miguel Angel Asturias was the second Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize. Born in Guatemala City in 1899, Asturias's family left the capitol when he was four years old fleeing political persecution. Asturias's childhood in the rural town of Salamá and his adolescence, spent under the shadow of an oppressive dictatorship, strongly shaped his later writing. The Mirror of Lida Sal is Asturias's only collection of short stories and provides an excellent introduction to the author's poetic prose. This first edition also features an introduction by Gerald Martin, a prestigious Miguel Angel Asturias scholar.