Illuminations: Five Journeys into the Dark Realm

By Rosa Martha Villareal

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Rosa Martha Villarreal's collection of short stories is a journey into illuminated darkness. Here is a writer who took Octavio Paz's admonition to heart: "to close your eyes, and lose yourself in the darkness under the blood-red forest of your eyelids." I cannot remember ever reading a contemporary author writing in English that so fully embraces the night, darkness, and the wisdom of death. Here burns the unashamed desire to see the in-between world beyond the hanged man, to hear the songs of vultures in ancient Pecan trees, to be blinded by starlight, and to awake to find scratches on one's face from the devil himself. Taken together these stories feel like an intoxicated evening spent in a literary garden of fragrant moon flowers, with Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges; mysterious, mystic, in the logic of dreams, and nightmares, but also pulsing with eros. Framed as a conversation between the author and the Latin American and Anglo speaking writers that inspired her, it is also a dialogue with her own identity as an American Latina, awake in English, but dreaming in Spanish, a writer happy to live and write on the border between the other side, in conversation, in mystery: A welcome spirit in our grimly polarized and binary times.

Paul Bargetto, American Theater director in Warsaw, Poland.
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Illuminations: Five Journeys into the Dark Realm is a gorgeous and fierce odyssey into worlds just beyond our own. Framed as a conversation with some of Rosa Martha Villarreal's favorite writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, and Maria Espinosa, among others, Villarreal's short story collection inhabits these literary spirits and powerfully adds to them. I was simply spellbound and felt as if I, too, were part of a riveting conversation that has lasted centuries and transcended worlds.
Illuminations: Five Journeys into the Dark Realm is nothing less than magical.

​Michael Zapata, author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau.

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TITLE: Illuminations: Five Journeys into the Dark Realm
AUTHORS: Rosa Martha Villarreal
PAPERBACK ISBN: 979-8990206854
PUBLISHER: Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press, under DeTodo Books Imprint
RETAIL PRICE: Paperback $20, E-book $2.99
PAGES: 114