Although written a century ago, the sixteen stories by Emilia Pardo Bazan collected in this volume are strikingly relevant to contemporary concerns. Noted for narrative complexity, stylistic variety, and feminist themes, Pardo Bazan's stories explore many aspects of the relationships between men and women. Both outspoken and witty, melancholy and humorous, these stories will interest general readers as well as students and scholars of Spanish literature.

"This is a collection of stories by Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921), a Spanish author who often found the subject matter of her stories in the mysteries and vicissitudes of life. Some of her tales are fictional accounts of actual occurrences or people ("The Pardon," "A Galician Mother," and "The Lady Bandit"); others are a defense of women subjugated by a double standard ("The Guilty Woman" and "The Faithful Fiancee"); a number focus on the figure of the rural priest ("A Descendant of the Cid" and "Don Carmelo's Salvation," for example). One highly symbolic story - "The White Horse" - qualifies Pardo Bazan as the godmother of the Generation of 98, the group of writers who exhorted Spain to begin anew, ridding itself of inertia, apathy, and fixation on past glories. Several of the collected tales are like contemporary suspense thrillers (such as "The Cuff Link" and "The White Hair"), while many others reveal a keen psychological insight ("The Torn Lace," "The Substitute," "Scissors," "The Nurse," and "Rescue"). Pardo Bazan's themes are fear, love, hatred, forgiveness, cruelty, poverty, necrophilia, repentance, homesickness, and madness - that is, naked reality, bitter reality, and often an ugly, vicious reality." "One of the indisputable giants of the nineteenth-century short story is Guy de Maupassant. Pardo Bazan met him (along with Daudet and Zola) in France and considered him - author of "The Horla" - to be the master of short story writers. However, although Maupassant influenced her (most notably in psychological inquiry and careful attention to realistic detail), Pardo Bazan put her own stamp on her stories and developed a style sui generis, the most striking feature of which is brevity." "The essence of Pardo Bazan's approach is to engage the reader as quickly as possible, certainly in the first paragraph, frequently in the first few sentences. Some aspect of a character or an episode is brought to light and the story unfolds rapidly. There are third-person narratives in which the author occasionally injects herself or her point of view. Other narratives are presented wholly in the first person - some by an omniscient narrator, some by the "players"; and, from time to time, Pardo Bazan has someone else tell the story to her, and then as narrator she becomes the audience." "It is entirely plausible that some of her graphic descriptions were intended to blunt accusations of softness (i.e., femininity) that in her era would - foolishly, but automatically - have been associated with a woman writer. Still, when the time came to represent the plight of women - in terms of natural, understandable sexual needs and intellectual acceptance - Pardo Bazan captured the anguish and inferior status of her Spanish sisters."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In this beautiful love story of "forbidden longing" (New York Times bestselling author Penelope Douglas), a sweet young woman and a rough and tough biker are connected in a way they can’t contain—and they’ll do anything they can to be together. When I was five years old, I told Toren Grace we were going to get married someday. He’d been my closest friend, my protector, and my rock since the day I was born. But during my senior year, our relationship slowly changed. Silly conversations morphed into serious heart-to-hearts. Innocent friendship turned to stolen glances. Then one day, an unexpected kiss changed everything. While that kiss was all I’d ever dreamed of, it knocked Tor clear off his axis. His strong moral compass makes it impossible for him to accept our feelings for each other. Because, not only am I eighteen and fifteen years younger than him, I’m the one person he should never, ever want. Tor is my father’s best friend—my pseudo uncle. Neither one of us can stand to betray or hurt my dad, but we can’t keep our relationship hidden forever. Will there be a way for us to find our happily-ever-after? Or will we all be torn apart? Torn is book one in the All Torn Up series but can be read as a standalone novel.

Before she wrote the bestselling Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

Caterina Albert i Paradis (1869-1966) began her career with a scandal. Her dramatic monologue "The Infanticide," delivered by a young woman, won prizes and garnered the attention of the Catalan literary world, but its harsh theme drew outrage when the anonymous author was revealed to be a woman. In the tradition of George Eliot, George Sand, and other controversial women authors, Albert had assumed a man's name, Víctor Catala. She continued to write unflinching narratives, mostly in Catalan, of the people and life around her, producing a body of work still enlisted today to help the Catalan language resist the dominance of Peninsular Spanish. ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

For many years, Ilsa Redlich has helped her parents run a hotel in South Amana, but as the United States enters the Great War, she can feel her world changing. The residents of the towns surrounding the Amana Colonies used to be accepting of their quiet, peaceful neighbors, but with anti-German sentiment running high, the Amana villages are now plagued by vandalism, threats, and insults. Things get even worse when Ilsa finds out her family won't be allowed to speak German in public--and that Garon, the childhood friend she's long been smitten with, has decided to join the army. Jutta Schmidt is shocked when several members of the Council of National Defense show up on her family's doorstep. Sure, the Schmidts once lived in the Amana Colonies, but that was years ago. She's even more surprised when the council demands that she travel to Amana and report back on any un-American activities. Not daring to disobey the government agents, Jutta takes a job at the South Amana hotel, befriends the daughter of the owners, and begins to eavesdrop every chance she gets. When Jutta hears Ilsa making antiwar remarks and observes Garon assisting a suspicious outsider, she is torn at the prospect of betraying her new friends. But what choice does she have? And when Garon is accused of something far worse than Jutta could imagine, can the Amana community come to his aid in time?

In Cigar Smoke and Violet Water, a work informed by feminist and narrative theory as well as by linguistic discourse analysis, Joyce Tolliver considers narrative tactics and their cultural context in the nineteenth-century Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921). The critical focus is on the narrative voices in short stories by this writer and on the role gender plays both in narrative dynamics and in the writer's engagement with her public.