Short stories
Luna en Veraguas
Not translated into English
Mario Augusto Rodríguez · 1948
Synopsis
Stories from the province of Veraguas, where the author came from, among the monte, the rivers and the village festivals, where love, fear and resentment drive characters such as Carmela, Antonio or Nicho. They include “Cobardía”, “La mejor venganza” and “Nochebuena dulce”, in which an unloved boy, fed on the scraps from the town's kitchens, tells a priest, in a church, how Linda, a thin little creature rejected by everyone, brought him his first happy Christmas Eve.
Context
The collection appeared in Panama in 1948, from the Ministry of Education, with a prologue by Octavio Méndez Pereira, a year after Campo adentro, its author's first book of stories. It contains “Nochebuena dulce”, winner of the Christmas contest of La Estrella de Panamá in 1944. The ministry's fine arts department reissued it in 229 pages, in 1961 according to Google Books, in 1963 according to Escritores Panamá. The author returned to the short narrative only in 1994, with Los ultrajados, devoted to the American invasion of 1989.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no published translation; short stories, in the speech of the province, of which “Nochebuena dulce” can be read online.
Prizes and reception
A collection praised by critics; Stella Sierra admired in its stories an uncommon sensibility and a rare way of reaching the essence of the national.
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