SEDA ARAÑA (SPIDER SILK)

Winner of the First National Short Novel Contest Parallel 21 | Escritoras Mexicanas, 2019, in which more than 600 novels by Mexican women participated. Finalist of the Romulo Gallegos of literature 2020.

World War II sounds. The Second Symphony of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov is playing. Inside a lighthouse that stopped Zeus from advancing, Elsa Linker quietly weaves invisible paths. She speaks with hundreds of spiders, of the Nephila genus, with whom she weaves parachutes for the Nazis, weaves in the silence in which Europe is submerged, she weaves her pain, and weaves the pain of humanity. An orange scarf plays in the wind, offering homage to her country… Spider Silk weaves reality and fiction together, to the point that we no longer are sure whether spiders can speak to us, whether we are actually listening to them. No one seems to listens. Not even fools.

TRES SILENCIOS (A THIRD SILENCE)

Marcela embraces her silences in a liquid atmosphere. The novel is the future of her life; It is the passing of a young woman, into motherhood, widowhood, and wisdom. While Isis, the goldfish, swims serenely in the depths of a Chinese legend that says that eternal youth may yet exist, a poet immortalizes life in his writings. The characters weave lace, like the breath of a sleeping baby, so delicate, like an intimate bouquet of flowers… A Third Silence is a novel that adheres to the skin of memory and that reminds us of just how sweet, and how bitter, it is to exist.

A Third Silence, was awarded second prize in the international contest José Eufemio Lora & Juan Carlos Onetti in Peru in 2010.

OTUMBA

Otumba is where Mexicans fought their last battle. The place where limbo found its broken people. But Otumba is also alive: it is alive with all those voices of the dead interspersed in the waves of time. It extends from dusk to dawn and from east to west. Otumba plunges us into the moment after death, when the broken body seeks to remain skin and eroticism. In Otumba there is no time. Everything is now. The protagonist Jaime enters a deep state of trance, enjoys momentary pleasure. Silvana closes the window of her perception. There is only Jaime’s voice, and the blank page in front of her. “This can’t be happening to me,” Silvana tells herself, and we ask each other with her. “Have we died?”, To which some voice within ourselves wants to assure us that: “No, of course not!” The light of dawn touches us, and only then do we understand, with Silvana, that a wall is not a barrier for the dead.

HISTORIAS DE MONTREAL (MONTREAL STORIES)

The editorial project has been promoted by the Imagina Community, a group of Hispanic-American authors residing in Canada that was founded four years ago with the aim of invigorating and promoting literature in Spanish in Canada. The new title is the second installment in a collection that began in 2016 with the publication of Toronto Stories. Antolina Ortiz and twenty-five other authors have been involved in this new project, using the city of Montreal as the setting for the development of their stories.