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Sweet Diamond Dust

Name: Sweet Diamond Dust
Price: 22.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Rosario Ferre
ISBN: 9780452277489

Paperback $22.00

Published on Oct 01, 1996 | 208 Pages

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$22.00

Published on Oct 01, 1996 | 208 Pages

Buy from Other Retailers:

Rosario Ferre uses family history as a metaphor for the class struggles and political evolution of Latin America and Puerto Rico in this highly provacative, profound, and delightfully readable collection of stories.

Originally published in Spanish under the title Maldito Amor (“Cursed Love”), Sweet Diamond Dust introduced American readers to a voice that is by turns lyrical and wickedly satiric. In this tale the De La Valle family’s secrets, ambitions, and passions, interwoven with the fate of the local sugar mill, are recounted by various relatives, friends, and servants. As the characters struggle under the burden of privilege, the story, permeated with haunting echoes of Puerto Rico’s own turbulent history, becomes a splendid allegory for a nation’s past.

The three accompanying stories each follow the lives of the descendants of the De La Valle family, making the book a drama in four parts, raising troubling issues of race, religion, freedom, and sex, with Ferre’s trademark irony and startling imagery.

“Lyrically voices the generation-bridging tale of the De La Valle family and their Puerto Rican sugar mill through the eyes and souls of several family members, longtime servants and dear friends… With a majestic plot, nestled in the hills of those Guamani Mountains, along with the De La Valle family and their sugar mill, Ferré exposes the secrets of a family and the glories of a country under pressure from American business threats. All at once, Sweet Diamond Dust explores the life of a family and of a business, through the generations and into our modern world.”—Lucy Stark, Voices from the Gaps

“[Ferre] is a perfect embodiment of the Janus-like identity Puerto Rico emanates today, a mythical creature with two heads set back to back, impossibly ‘loyal to two fatherlands,’ as the memorialist Bernardo Vega once put it.”—Ilan Stavans, World Literature Today

Author

Rosario Ferre

Rosario Ferré nació en 1938 en Ponce, una ciudad en las costa sur de Puerto Rico. Se graduó en el año 1960 de Manjattanville College con un título en literature inglesa. Luego obtuvo una maestría en literature española y latinoamericana en la Universidad de Puerto Rico, y años mas tarde, recibó su doctorado de la Universidad de Maryland. Comenzó a escribir en la década de los años setenta como redactora y editora de la revista literaria Zona: Carga y Descarga, en la cual se publicaban trabajos de jóvenes escritores puertorriqueños. Colaboradora asidua de los rotativos El Nueva Día y el San Juan Star, Rosario Ferré ha explorado todos los géneros literarios al publicar relatos, poesía, ensayos, biografías y cuatro novelas. Fue galardonada con el premio Liberaturpries del 1992 en Francfort del main (Alemania), y la versión de lengua inglesa de su novela La casa de la laguna quedó como finalista del premio literario estadounidese National Book Award. Rosario Ferré es reconocida hoy como una de las escritoras más importantes de Puerto Rico.Rosario Ferre is Puerto Rico’s leading woman of letters, with several books of poetry, short fiction, biography, and feminist criticism to her credit. She lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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Sweet Diamond Dust

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Success!

By Rosario FerrePreface by Rosario FerreTranslated by Rosario Ferre

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