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The Week of Colors by Elena Garro

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Short stories from the “cursed mother of magical realism” (El Mundo), now in English for the first time  

A woman flits between two realities centuries apart, as scenes from the violent conquest of Mexico bleed their way into her comfortable contemporary life. Two little girls visit the home of a sorcerer who tortures women named after the days of the week. Girls become dogs, a laborer hides human bones in bricks he’ll use to build a new development, and an old woman appears at an acquaintance’s door one night with a knife and a bone-chilling confession.

With The Week of Colors, Elena Garro laid the groundwork for the literary movements that would shape the landscape of Latin American fiction and beyond. Here you’ll find the early roots of magical realism, feminist horror, and anticolonial speculative fiction. In The Week of Colors, Garro highlights the violence in our history, our homes, and our hearts, in vivid color.

Short stories from the “cursed mother of magical realism” (El Mundo), now in English for the first time  

A woman flits between two realities centuries apart, as scenes from the violent conquest of Mexico bleed their way into her comfortable contemporary life. Two little girls visit the home of a sorcerer who tortures women named after the days of the week. Girls become dogs, a laborer hides human bones in bricks he’ll use to build a new development, and an old woman appears at an acquaintance’s door one night with a knife and a bone-chilling confession.

With The Week of Colors, Elena Garro laid the groundwork for the literary movements that would shape the landscape of Latin American fiction and beyond. Here you’ll find the early roots of magical realism, feminist horror, and anticolonial speculative fiction. In The Week of Colors, Garro highlights the violence in our history, our homes, and our hearts, in vivid color.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elena Garro (1916-1998) is one of the most important writers of 20th Century Mexican and Hispanic Literature. Playwright, novelist, short-story author, journalist, screenwriter and poet. From the fifties, her work that stands out are one act plays, “Un hogar sólido” (A Solid Home) “El árbol” (The Tree), “Los perros” (The Dogs) and “La señora del balcón” (The Lady of the Balcony) (compiled in Elena Garro: Works Reunited. Theater, FCE, 2009). In them, themes of existential order, of race and of gender are addressed, renewing previously ‘costumbrista’ theater. She is considered a precursor to so-called magic realism because of her theatrical pieces, as well as for her novel, Recollections of Things to Come (Xavier Villarrutia Award, 1963). In this work, she accomplishes an acerbic analysis of the treason of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 at the same time as she presents the myths that shape up the idiosyncracy of Mexico, with a singular handling of time by juxtaposing and fusing the western cosmovision with the prehispanic. In her collection of stories, The Week of Colors, one of her most emblematic short stories, “Blame the tlaxcaltecas,” stands out. In the role of activist, she wrote countless articles and reports on the 1960’s in her struggle for democracy and social justice against the dictatorship of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). This led the government to discredit and exile her (1968-1993). In her ample bibliography, We are fleeing Lola (1980), Testimonies about Mariana (1981), Reunion of Characters (1982), And Matarazo Didn’t Call… (1991), Memories of Spain 1937 (1992), Inés (1995), among others, stand out.