Translated by Dick Cluster, Marina Harss, Mark Schafer and Alan West-Duran
Marta Veneranda, a Latina nuyorkina, finds that she inspires the confessional in people. In fact, when people come to her, they feel the need to reveal their most embarrassing and shameful stories. And through these reluctantly told tales, where characters enter and leave each other's narrations, Rivera-Valdes revisits and questions our most basic behavioral assumptions.
In "Little Poisons," the narrator shares with Marta the minutiae of her self-help-book-assisted liberation from her philandering husband, whom she will eventually poison to death, and whose mistress she will befriend: "In the fifteen years of marriage he would tell me everything, even about his sexual escapades—if he couldn't share them with me, who would he share them with? Besides, that way no one could come running to me spreading rumors."
Beneath the humor is a dead-serious scrutiny of the commingling of Anglo and Latino cultures. At heart, The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda are an exposé of the comforts and discomforts of that cohabitation.
Born in Cuba, Sonia Rivera-Valdés moved to New York City in 1966. Considered one of the most important Cuban writers alive, she has had stories appear in many anthologies in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, including Cubana and Dream with No Name. Rivera-Valdés is president of Latino Artists Round Table (LART), a cultural organization dedicated to fostering communication between Latino/a artists in the US, Latin America, and Spain. She has written extensively on Latin American and Hispanic literature, and is a professor of Latin American Literature at York College. In 1997, Rivera-Valdés became only the second Cuban residing outside the island to receive the prestigious Casa de las Americas Literature Award.
