My Christina and Other Stories

My Christina & Other Stories Years after her death, Mercegrave; Rodoreda's work is enjoying a well-deserved renaissance. The seventeen stories that comprise this volume vary tremendously in tone and style, from the hallucinatory to the bleakly realistic, from tales of tenderness and love to stories that might best be called folktales, reality merged with dream.

MercF Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908, at a time when Catalonia was autonomous and its citizens were allowed to speak, write, and study their own language. She published five novels between 1932 and 1937, and then fled to exile in Paris and then Geneva at the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the Catalan culture was brutally suppressed. She did not publish again until 1959. Afterwards, she regularly produced novels and collections of short stories and became a fixture on Catalan best-seller lists. When Franco died, most restrictions on the use of Catalan were lifted, and Rodoreda returned to Barcelona, where she died of cancer in April 1983.

David H. Rosenthal is well-known for his translations from the Catalan. His most recent book is a translation of the 15th century Catalan classic Tirant lo Blanc. He is the translator of Rodoreda's novel The Time of the Doves, as well as Modern Catalan Poetry: An Anthology. He lives in New York City and spends much of the year in Barcelona.

My Christina & Other Stories

Years after her death, Mercè Rodoreda's work is enjoying a well-deserved renaissance. The seventeen stories that comprise this volume vary tremendously in tone and style, from the hallucinatory to the bleakly realistic, from tales of tenderness and love to stories that might best be called folktales, reality merged with dream.

"The humor in the stories, as well as their thrill of realism, comes from a Nabokovian precision of observation and transformation of plain experience into enchanting prose."--Todd Crespi, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A compelling stylist, well translated, with passages of stunning imagery in virtually every story."--Kirkus Reviews

"Mr. Rosenthal's translation is top-flight and does justice to some of the best prose that has been written in Spain in the modern era."--Gregory Rabassa, The New York Times

Timesof the Doves and Camellia Street, also by Mercè Rodoreda, are available from Graywolf Press.