Rosario Ferré has become the "translator" of the reality of Puerto Rican women, opening the doors for the feminist movement on the island. By combining classical mythology with indigenous folktales that usurp the traditional actions of female...

Rosario Ferre has been in the vanguard of fiction, criticism, and theory, in recent years and has helped Puerto Rico assume a more respectable place in Latin American literature. It may be safely stated that her own search for identity as a Latin...

New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2001 262 pages. $24. ISBN 0-374-15648-4 FLIGHT OF THE SWAN, Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferre's most recent novel in English, tells the story of Russian prima ballerina, Madame (a fictionalization of Anna Pavlova), and her troupe...

In the following interview, originally conducted in June, 1991, Ferré discusses her personal background and the nature of her writings, touching on such concerns as the advantages and difficulties of writing about the homeland she left; the role of anger and magic in her work and in Latin American literature in general; the significance of race, class, and gender as a Puerto Rican woman writer; the art of translating fiction; the relationship between autobiography and fiction; and Puerto Rican cultu...

In the following interview, which took place in 1991, Ferré discusses her background and fiction, particularly her stories.

In the following essay, adapted by the author from a speech, Ferré discusses her personal motivations for writing fiction. Ferré states: "Writing is for me above all a physical knowledge, an irrefutable proof that my human form — individual and collective — exists. But writing is also an intellectual knowledge, the discovery of a form that precedes me. It is only through pleasure that we can encode the testimony of the particular in the experience of the general, as a rec...