Before

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Before, like Scheherezade, she produced her thousand and one novels, short stories, poems, plays, pamphlets, essay collections and literary critiques, before she wrote her historical fictions about Cleopatra, Caribbean pirates, Cervantes on the battlefield on Lepanto, and nineteenth century Texas border skirmishes, before she did her investigative reports of contemporary narco-terrorism and her rediscoveries of neglected women writers, Carmen Boullosa wrote Before (Antes), a haunting and haunted novella. It was brought out in 1989 by Vuelta, the publishing house founded and run by Octavio Paz. She was thirty-five years old at the time, and received the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for this novella, and for a volume of her poems and an essay collection also published that year. You might say, however, that Before launched her, and she has been soaring ever since.

We turn to it now with the realization that there can already be found here many quintessential Boullosa stylistics and preoccupations: the rush of urgent speech, teetering between humor and panic; the agreeable pact with melancholy; the appearance of grotesque, supernatural and sensually erotic elements in everyday life; the female body as a contested site of wayward power and unrest.

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