The fat man from La Paz: contemporary fiction from Bolivia

Rosario Santos

Seven Stories Press, Sep 1, 2000 - Fiction - 314 pages

The twenty stories collected in this volume offer not only a comprehensive look at the variety and invention of Bolivian literature, but also provide more information about the heart and soul of Bolivia than a warehouse full of news reports. The most comprehensive collection of modern Bolivian literature yet published in English, The Fat Man from La Paz offers a kaleidoscopic view of the country's last fifty years, from a sociological and cultural viewpoint. The Fat Man from La Paz places such Bolivian luminaries as Augusto Cespedes, whose The Well is probably the most published piece of Bolivian literature, alongside bright young stars like Edmundo Paz Soldan, one of last year's finalists for the Romulo Gallegos Literary Prize (the Nobel prize for Latin American writers). In the title story, Gonzalo Lema's "The Fat Man from La Paz," a Bolivian detective, with a nod to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, takes a hard look at corruption in Bolivia's capital city and learns a thing or two about the dark ambiguities lurking in human nature and in the communities people build. Many of the other stories in The Fat Man from La Paz appear here for the first time in English.

What people are saying

Review: The Fat Man from La Paz: Contemporary Fiction from Bolivia

User Review  - Andrew - Goodreads

This is an impossible book to rate, since some of these stories are excellent and some are quite lousy. I did not read every story in this collection, but I managed to get through most of them. The ...

Review: The Fat Man from La Paz: Contemporary Fiction from Bolivia

User Review  - Jessie - Goodreads

Unless you want to read some roughly hewn, Bolivian-focused short stories that appear to require some knowledge of the place to understand, forget it.

Contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: 11
• The Cannon of Punta Grande 235: 15
• INTRODUCTION by Javier Sanjin: 17

About the author

Rosario Santos directs Fulbright Programs for Latin America for the Institute of International Education. She has been the managing editor of the literary journal, Review, Lation American Art and Literature, and the director of the literarture program of the Center for Inter-American Relations.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The fat man from La Paz: contemporary fiction from Bolivia
• Author: Rosario Santos
• Editor: Rosario Santos
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2000
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Apr 3, 2008
• ISBN: 1583220305, 9781583220306
• Length: 314 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Anthologies (multiple authors); Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary; Literary Collections / Caribbean & Latin American; Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American; Literary Criticism / General