Providing the narrative thread to life is one of the oldest functions in culture. People need storytellers. They make sense out of life. Instead of b… - Kathleen Alcalá

In Latin America, there hasn't necessarily been a clear line between fantastic literature and literary fiction. This has allowed writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Clarice Lispector to be noticed by upstanding and respectable critics of modern culture, and has led to the eventual translation of their work, as well as that of many others. They now form a canon of work against which all the rest of us must be compared, although, in many cases, we have little in common with them other than the Spanish language.

Since we were in church half the time, I used to sit there and read the Bible, which, like Shakespeare, encompasses most of the human condition.

In this desert was my beginning. My ancestors were born here, lived and loved here, suffered loss here, and died. Eventually, war scattered us, and we have lived a sort of exile ever since. But in our exile, the stories of the desert have taken on mythic qualities. Nothing else can ever fill up the empty place in our hearts left when we departed this place. Only the deserts and the oceans, the places where the rhythms of the universe are most apparent, can assuage that ache for a few moments. ("The Desert Remembers My Name", March 24, 2000 at The Border Book Festival in New Mexico)