Many thanks to Dr. Johanna Drucker—UCLA scholar of, among other pursuits, the digital humanities, visual cultures, and experimental typographies and poetics—for a gorgeous review of Señorita Etcetera: a three-story collection (deemed "the first Latin American avant-garde prose writings") by the Mexican-Guatemalan writer Arqueles Vela, orbiting the lives of women and staging the "fracturing" and "dissociating" forces of 20th-century urban modernity, all "dissonance … noise, lights, and distractions."
Read Asterism's highlight of Johanna Drucker's review.
Julianna Neuhouser's translation preserves the "palimpsestic quality" of the original—the feeling, in Drucker's words, that "one image is written into and onto the ghost of another"—conveying through a careful geometry sentences that "open with the deliberate complexity of origami." The result is a disorientation of psychic, spatial, and linguistic dimensions, anticipating, finally, our uniquely 21st-century moment of "refractive … hyper-techno-saturation."
Find Drucker's review on her Substack, @johannadrucker, and order Señorita Etcetera today.
Señorita Etcetera is distributed by Asterism Books.