Cloudburst is a milestone in Canadian literature. For over a
half-century, beginning with the Spanish Civil War and continuing
through the coups d'état and military repression in South and Central
America in the 1970s and 80s, Spanish-speaking writers have been
arriving in Canada as exiles and immigrants and have been creating new
works in their native language. Cloudburst is the first anthology of
short stories by Hispanic Canadian writers from across Latin America and
Spain to appear in English. Edited by Luis Molina Lora and Julio
Torres-Recinos and first published in Spanish as Retrato de una nube:
primera antología del cuento hispano canadiense in 2008, Cloudburst
is a prodigious collective work, containing forty-two stories by
twenty-two authors from nine different countries--Argentina, Bolivia,
Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Spain--and
rendered into English by seven translators.
The stories in Cloudburst reflect the enormous variety of Hispanic
writing in Canada today. Each of the authors' native countries has its
own artistic and literary tradition, yet all are bound together by the
Spanish linguistic and cultural sphere. Moreover, the women and men in
the anthology have settled in cities and towns across Canada, some of
them entering into contact with the English-speaking literary world,
others with the French. A number of them began writing before they left
their homelands, while many of the younger contributors started their
careers in Canada. Some of them prefer a traditional literary style,
others a more surrealist, experimental, or colloquial approach. All of
them are passionate about their writing, and all have gone through the
common experience of leaving or being uprooted from the land of their
birth and settling in Canada, where they face the challenges and
difficulties involved in reestablishing their lives in a largely unknown
environment. In Cloudburst, through the prism of translation, they
share their latest fiction with English-speaking readers.
