Cuba on the Edge presents recent short stories by twenty-one of the best writers on the island. The title refers both to Cubans' awareness of living on the brink of an unknown future, and to the edginess with which they negotiate their way through uncertainties. These twenty-one perspectives reveal very diverse responses to the challenges of daily life. Some stories are set in Havana, while others depict rural or small town Cuba. Many analyze gender roles and gender politics, as well as depicting economic stress and ingenious coping strategies. Some tales are dark, while others are hilarious. Some voices remember the past, and others imagine the future. Many stories address contro-versial topics: prostitution, crime, exile, disillusionment, skepticism. But the predominant tone is of reaffirmation of human ties and survival, and of celebration of the complex strata of Cuban experience.

In 1908, Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru 1852-Argentina 1909), a lifelong journalist, feminist and writer, traveled to Europe: Viaje de recreo (Pleasure trip) is her account of her vivid impressions. She was particularly interested in the education of women and in women's career opportunities, but she was also fascinated by the cultural differences between the West European countries. Her analysis and descriptions will fascinate anyone interested in the genre of travel accounts, in museum studies, in feminist history, or, of course, in Matto's life and writings. In Viaje de recreo, Matto analyzes the cultural displays of Spain, France, England, and Italy in great detail, and comments on Switzerland and Germany as well. She is particularly intrigued by museums, art, architecture, and cultural productions. She speculates at length about the differences between the European countries. Viaje de recreo is both a perceptive travel memoir and a lively autobiography of personal reflections. Matto was profoundly moved by English honesty and honor, disappointed that French feminism did not meet her expectations, impressed by Spanish women writers and activists, and deeply impressed by the beauties of Italy. She frequently compares Roman ruins with Incan heritage in Peru, lamenting their replacement by less tolerant societies. She is impressed by new technologies - cars, trams, trains, electrical devices, escalators, factories - but even more fascinated by women's lives and presence in each country, and by the ways each country has preserved and displayed its cultural history. This new edition includes extensive footnotes as well as an introduction to the book and to its author, with bibliography. The editor, Mary G. Berg, is author of a dozen articles about Clorinda Matto de Turner, and has edited Matto's novels Indole and Herencia (Stockcero). She is a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center, and is finishing a biography of Matto.

Mecha Iturbe, published in Buenos Aires in 1906, is the most ambitious and longest of Cesar Duayen's five novels about the transformation of Argentina into a contemporary state in the early part of the 20th century. Cesar Duayen, pseudonym of Emma de la Barra (1861-1947), was the author of Argentina's best seller, Stella of 1905, and Mecha Iturbe, too, was greeted with great excitement. A record number of copies were printed, and the author was paid an unprecedented amount. There were many editions, but none has been available in recent years. In Mecha Iturbe, elements of national reform and modernization are portrayed and debated in an even more complicated failed love story, also set in both Buenos Aires (drawing rooms, congress, the opera, a labor union rally) and in a utopian factory town. The central character, Mecha Iturbe, has just come from Europe so Argentina must be explained to her, and shown to her. But Mecha, from whose point of view everything is seen, is a very traditional Argentine-born woman who resists modernization --she likes being an upper class, affluent, Catholic conservative, she likes organizing charity balls and buying fashionable new clothes-- and who has the misfortune to fall in love with a reform-minded, idealistic medical doctor who expects her to want to change and improve Argentina. The other major woman character is a surgeon, who eventually marries an up and coming politician and labor leader, but continues to practice medicine. With a prologue and notes by Mary G. Berg, this novel would be a discussion-provoking addition to any class on Argentine, Southern Cone or Latin American 20th century history, women's studies, or literature

Mi vestido verde esmeralda by Alister Ramrez Mrquez recounts the life story of Clara, born poor in isolated, rural Colombia in 1900, who makes her way, after a mythic journey through forests, mountains and swamps to the western region of the Quindo, to the city of Armenia, now the heart of coffee and banana production. This remarkable novel, first published in 2003, is the tale of Clara's adventurous journey and subsequent rise to prosperity as the owner of a farm and restaurant and mother of six, ending with years of political strife and the dissolution of her family. The novel provides an overview of a century of dramatic strife and change in Clara's personal trajectory and in the history of the nation. Alister Ramrez Mrquez is from this area of Colombia, but lives in New York; he is the author of a number of books, and Mi vestido verde esmeralda is his first novel, fusing familiarity and nostalgia in this tale of a journey through the twentieth century. This novel would be engaging reading in courses on Colombian history or literature, and in courses on topics of search for self-definition (personal and national), fluctuating cycles and rhythms of a century of transitions, life as a journey, or the meaning of progress. This edition of Mi vestido verde esmeralda includes extensive annotation of the Colombian references, and a prologue and bibliography by Clara E. Ronderos and Mary G. Berg, professors of Latin American literature in Massachusetts.

The 20th century's first Argentine best seller was Csar Duyen's novel Stella of 1905. "Csar Duyen" was quickly revealed to be Emma de la Barra (1861-1947), who besides founding the first professional school for women in Argentina, the national Red Cross, and a model factory workers' community, published five extraordinarily sucessful novels about Argentine society in the early part of the century. It was a time of economic anxiety and eagerness to redefine the responsibilities of citizens, both men and women, in this new era of rapid technological change and shifting global relationships. Traditional identities are outdated, and the existing social elite (embodied in Stella by the Maura Sagasta/Quiroz family) must modernize or slip into moral and financial bankruptcy. The central character of the novel is a young woman who engages in an uphill battle to educate and transform not only her own upper class family, but everyone. It is a love story that never quite happens, a portrayal of an Argentina that does not quite manage to enter the modern age, either in upper class urban society or out on the family ranches where obsolete methods go unchallenged. The heroine's efforts to instill European efficiency, egalitarian morality and a determined work ethic are part of a lively and appealing story. It explores the possible roles for modern women in an Argentina that now offers improved women's education and professional possibilities, as well as dramatizing the dilemmas of a 19th century nation confronting rapid changes. This centennial edition of Stella has been updated with plentiful footnotes and a critical introduction by Mary G. Berg, author of many studies of Latin American women writers and their times. This novel would fit well into courses on Latin American narrative, women writers, Southern Cone history, gender and cultural studies, and nation-building.

Herencia (1895) set in the city of Lima during the last decades of the XIX Century, is the third deliberately controversial novel written by Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru, 1852-1909), well known by then for her novels, Aves sin nido (1889) and Indole (1891), which take place in rural Andean Peru. An experienced writer of essays, historical fiction and biographies, Clorinda Matto had a sociologist's sharply observant eye, but by 1895, when she published Herencia, Clorinda Matto's days as an aggressive journalist in Lima were numbered. Only a few months later, she fled into exile in Argentina and never returned to Peru. Herencia, an analysis of class and gender in Lima, told through the stories of six women's interwoven lives, can be read as Matto's no-holds-barred expos of what she really thought of Lima society of the late 1880s, a society in the throes of major changes. In the aftermath of the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879-83), Peru's ruling classes struggled to regain and retain their social and political power, but they were challenged by many new circumstances. A flood of modern ideas and commercial products, as well as new immigrants, forced changes, and Lima evolved rapidly, despite resistance. In a world of new department stores, economic possibilities, trains, sewing machines and modern mores, Matto's women characters struggle to define their lives as they succeed or fail in this society in flux. Matto was fascinated by the new sciences of eugenics and evolution, and the central issues of the novel are related to unresolved debates about the relative importance of Nature (genes, biological inheritance) vs. Nurture (education, environment). Considered shocking and even pornographic at the time, because of its depiction of women's sexuality, Herencia remains a vivid analysis of upper, bourgeois, and lower class women's lives in Lima at a time of unprecedented dramatic social changes. This novel, extensively annotated, with an introduction and bibliography by Mary G. Berg, would be a lively addition to courses on 19th century Latin America, 19th century Women's History, the rise of mercantilism and commerce, a history of women journalists, or an Upstairs/Downstairs approach to the analysis of history and society.

Clorinda Matto de Turner's second novel, Indole, was published in Lima in 1891, two years after her Aves sin nido shocked the Peruvian reading public with its forthright criticism of Church and state corruption. Like Aves, Indole dramatizes the liberal reformist anticlericalism of late nineteenth century political debates, and is also set in a small Andean town surrounded by outlying haciendas. But in Indole, the town is a stable and basically happy one, where indigenous people, mestizos and landowners of Spanish descent live harmoniously in a beautiful Andean valley. Matto's journalistic ambition to document people's appearance and behavior in detail, and her close attention to the dynamics of gender, race and class, produces a vivid analysis of small town life in 1858, complete with an army batallion sweeping through at the end on its way to retake Arequipa for Ramn Castilla, placing the fictive town of Rosalina in a historical national framework. Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909) was born in Cusco, grew up on a rural estate speaking Quechua, married an English businessman and settled with him in Tinta, a town very much like Indole's Rosalina. After his death, when she was already a well-established writer, she became the editor of the newspaper La Bolsa of Arequipa, and later of El Per Ilustrado in Lima. Her liberal reformism and activism made her many enemies, and in 1895 she had to leave Per, and she moved to Buenos Aires, where she founded another newspaper, Bcaro americano. She published thousands of articles and editorials, legends, tradiciones and biographies, as well as three novels in which she sought to define models of the ideal citizens of a rapidly modernizing Peru, and in which she denounced corruption, immoral behavior, and laziness. This edition of Indole has been updated with plentiful footnotes and a critical introduction by Mary G. Berg, author of many excellent studies of Latin American women writers and their times. This novel would fit well into courses on Latin American narrative, women writers, Peruvian history, gender and cultural studies, and nation-building in the nineteenth century.

In 1875, Juana Manuela Gorriti hurried to finish her new novel, Peregrinaciones de una alma triste, in order to include it in the two-volume collection, Panoramas de la vida, published in 1876, dedicated to the women of Buenos Aires. Peregrinaciones is both the story of a young woman's dramatic liberation and self-discovery, and a critical travelogue of conditions in southern South America. The narrator, Laura, tells a close woman friend about her escape from her home in Lima, where she was dying of tuberculosis, and the series of adventures that stimulated her into health, independence and energetic engagement with the welfare of others. As she travels, she witnesses the horrors and glories of 19th century society, from bandit attacks, civil wars, and indigeneous rebellions to the cruelties of slavery. She journeys through varied terrain, from mountain peaks to the jungle, where she dresses in male clothing for self-protection. At this time when national identity was being defined, Laura assesses the populations and problems of the Southern Cone nations, with the help of the friends she makes during the course of her travels. Juana Manuela Gorriti (1818-1892) is one of the best known and most eloquent 19th century writers of fiction. Born in Argentina, she went to Bolivia with her family after her Unitarian father was defeated by Juan Facundo Quiroga in 1831. She settled in Peru, began to publish stories and novels, and established a literary salon attended by Lima's leading intellectuals. Ever restless, like the protagonist of Peregrinaciones, she traveled frequently and wrote about it, very aware of changing conditions as Peru, Chile and Argentina modernized. She died in Buenos Aires, where many of her books were first published, including Sueos y realidades, Panoramas de la vida, El mundo de los recuerdos, and many others. This edition of Peregrinaciones has been updated with plentiful footnotes and a critical introduction by Mary G. Berg, author of many studies of Latin American women writers and their times. This novel would fit well into courses on Latin American narrative, women writers, Southern Cone history, gender and cultural studies, and nation-building in the nineteenth century.