

Readers looking for deeply shaded characters and complex plots may be underwhelmed this work is best suited for those who appreciate dark, unadorned metaphorical fiction.Īn intriguing, chilling collection that demands introspection from its readers.Īs atmospheric as its companion, Twilight Comes Twice, this tone poem pairs poetically intense writing with luminescent oils featuring widely spaced houses, open lawns, and clumps of autumnal trees, all lit by a huge full moon. There are ample cliffhangers, last-minute twists to disarm the reader, and multiple bleak endings some plotlines grow repetitive. While it can be assumed all tales are set in Cuba, where Llanillo was born and died, many make scant mention of place and time. He knew that at ten o’clock, ringing like a flock of doves, the telephone would take over his evening.” With vague, even sinister titles like “Vengeance,” “The Cane,” and “On the Train,” her writing often ruminates on flawed social structures personal weakness, like machismo or vanity and unfulfilled desire. Llanillo’s spare, measured prose conveys emotion in few words: “Each evening she became a bit more the very axis of his existence.

Many entries are quite short, and some would qualify as flash fiction. Each tale is told in English and Spanish, with translations by Martínez and Cooper that offer slightly different tones Spanish readers will find the stories conveyed with more humor than the English versions. Most have appeared in her previous anthologies, but this is the first published posthumously and the widest in scope. These stories and more can be found in this collection by Llanillo, renowned in Latin America for her literary musings on faith, anguish, and death. Llanillo’s bilingual short stories explore the spiritual, macabre, and mundane.Ī young woman’s luxurious handkerchief slowly sucks the life out of her a skeptical man meets his guardian angel that only he can see an innocuous email from a friend drives a woman to the brink of insanity. The song, based on a Xhosa lullaby, still has that hard-to-resist sing-along potential, and the themes of waging peace, collective action, and the benefits of sound ecological practices are presented in ways that children will both appreciate and enjoy. Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant.
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How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course.

But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam-but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages.
