Found in translation

Mexico has long served as a dumping ground for Anglo fantasies of histrionic dissolution: Malcolm Lowry's crumbling consul in "Under the Volcano," Graham Greene's whiskey priest in "The Power and the Glory" -- not to mention rafts of recent margarita thrillers and tales of drug deals gone wrong. The country's physical extravagance -- deserts, jungles, mountains and coasts -- seems to invite extremes: cults and \o7chupacabras\f7, tyrants and \o7bandidos\f7, fugitives and remittance men, witches and holy waters and miracle cancer cures. So, Mexico stands in the North American imagination as its permanent exotic -- lawless, colorful, untamed -- and its collective dark unconscious. Land of salsa and \o7sabor\f7, fiestas and revelry, ghosts and gore. A country riddled with bullet holes and beauty.

This simplistic, often exploitative picture quickly collapses before the work of Mexican writers. In the past, we've had the magisterial poet and essayist Octavio Paz as well as fiction by Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel (both of whom are included in this volume) and occasionally others rendered into English. But few of Mexico's vast and varied contemporary literary voices have had a chance to speak to us. Mayo has gathered here established authors as well as relative unknowns, providing a rich banquet -- to borrow her term (and the title of one of the stories). Organized by region, the works begin along the U.S. border and move south, ending in deepest Chiapas and Yucatan.

Inez Arredondo's "The Silent Words" weaves a poetic tale about a Chinese ranch worker in Sinaloa, reminding us that Mexico is home to more than the mestizo. "According to Evaristo," by Jesus Gardea, follows the course of a friendship between an herbalist and the narrator's father in which silence and smells, winds and herbs, create paradoxical resonances. In Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo's "The Green Bottle," a woman in a forgotten salt-mining village waits vainly for her son to return from the States.

In these three strong narratives from Mexico's barren north, you hear something highly original, akin perhaps only to the deep reaches of our Southern Gothic -- Flannery O'Connor or William Faulkner, at times. Sometimes people fall silent or don't answer when spoken to. Dry winds or fleeting memories fill the spaces between the words. One senses the hand of Juan Rulfo, an earlier Mexican master whose novel "Pedro Paramo" (available in English) indelibly etched the haunted wastes and mystic silences of rural Mexico.