Afternoon of the Dinosaur - Softcover

Afternoon of the Dinosaur, by Cristina Peri Rossi, one of the most important Spanish writers of our time, was first published in 1976. Due to censorship in Spain under Franco, it was initially distributed only in Latin America. Then, in 1984, it was published again by Plaza y Janes (Barcelona), and in 2008 it was reissued by Tropo Editores (Zaragoza). This volume is composed of eight lyrical and powerful short stories bound together by themes of alienation and generational conflict in the modern world. According to the author, the stories are all connected by a sense of persecution and by the solidarity that this sometimes creates between two persons. The first, From Brother to Sister, deals with the yearnings of love of an adolescent for his sister. In the second, At the Beach, a young couple encounters a child who both mystifies and troubles them with her extraordinary questions. With The Influence of Edgar A. Poe on the Poet Raimundo Arias, we find the deep-felt sense of exile of Peri Rossi herself. Two pieces of this collection that carry the title Simulacrum give us a science-fiction world of space travel in which human feelings are lost. As the author says, the final word of the tale is 'mercy, ' (it is a sense of) pity that I feel for myself and for all human beings, because we are condemned to die, to suffer dictatorships, because we are condemned many times to oppression, and we need to seek out, in the midst of this suffering, our fellow men. As for the title story of this collection, The Afternoon of the Dinosaur, the author confesses that her dreams, at the time of the military dictatorship in Montevideo when people simply disappeared, were often haunted by terrifying dinosaurs. The dinosaur, for her, symbolized fear, danger, the threat of the government. She wanted to tame the dinosaur, to change it into a loving character. It was only after she wrote this story that dinosaurs disappeared from her dreams. Julio Cortazar writes: Cristina Peri Rossi is no