Ana María Shua Quotes (1951-)

“Henry Michaux has been very important for me, with his Voyage en Grande Garabagne. Michaux was considered a poet but I find his work absolutely narrative. He would have been a flash fiction author today.”

“Shua is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed flash fiction writers. We see this first in her publication of La sueñera in 1984 and then non-stop with collections such as Casa de Geishas (1992) and Fenómenos de circo (2011; published in English as Without a Net, Hanging Loose Press, 2012). Several such collections have been published in Madrid in one volume, Cazadores de Letras (2009). In her flash fictions we see a creative talent who seeks constantly challenges of form and content. Shua is the product of her time and place; in her flash fictions we hear idioms specific to a Buenos Aires argentinidad (Argentine-ness), for instance. Yet, she’s restless, carefully crafting flash fictional worlds that transcend time and place. She never accepts the inertia formulaic solutions and representations. In her flash fictions we travel from the mundane to the metaphysical, from the ugly to the sublime. We are made privy to the power play within family units and between lovers. In her collection Microfictions, for instance, we encounter inanimate objects like blow dryers with interior states—a refrigerator that softly purrs at night “in heat for its mate” and a statue that “smiles impassively, somewhat amazed as she admires the perfection of the sculptor, her creation”. She wraps language around her finger (every word counts) to offer her readers a penetrating look into what makes us tick—and what makes reality glisten. Whether her characters are old, young, women, men, animals, objects and the like, she invests them with complex thinking, desiring, and dreaming subjectivities. Shua’s incisive quick visions—gestalts—make constantly new our experience of the world. It is from the Americas and with Shua’s flash fictions at the vanguard that we see the radical transformation of our planetary republic of letters.”