Beatle Dreams and Other Stories FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this playful and sometimes political collection of short stories, Guillermo Samperio continuously toys with the prejudices and fashionable fetishes of his contemporaries, as exemplified in his "poetic portraits" of women. Much of his seemingly serious prose is tongue-in-cheek humor, as in Yurecaro, an initiation story that combines the poetic, the erotic, the rural and the urban, laced with a youthful, picaresque humor. Humor, fantasy and social irony characterize the astonishing work of Mexican writer Guillermo Samperio, who has produced more than 170 stories in a dozen volumes. Samperio sees literature as an aggression against established values, in politics and in art. An extraordinary observer of human nature, he plays with the relationship between author, reader and text, producing unexpected and imaginative results.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This awkward collection includes short stories, studies, reflections and character sketches. Much of it is highly experimental. In ``She Lived in a Story,'' a writer named Segovia, a thinly veiled stand-in for the Mexican Samperio, has the idea for a story about a young woman who realizes she's just a character in a narrative. When this woman starts writing in her journal about the feeling, she is soon describing Segovia's actions as he comes to the same realization she has reached. A series of six very short tales is based on the conceit that women's personalities are determined by the color of the shoes they wear. Two other selections describe two archetypes of office life. Samperio's writing is lively and fun and the translation is lucid, but some of the conceits are precious, and often the execution is too skimpy (26 of the 37 stories take up five pages or fewer) to carry the stentorian style. (Sept.)
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