In the following interview conducted in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1978, Valenzuela talks about literary and other influences, the relationship between semiotics and eroticism, the similarities of love and death, her approach to language and politics in her works, the question of gendered writing and themes, and the situation of contemporary Hispanic American women writers.

In the following essay, Ainsa considers the transformation in Luisa Valenzuela's work from individual to collective fear and discusses her attempt to overcome fear through writing.

In the essay below, Kerr explicates the narrative features of Black Novel in terms of conventional crime fiction and its relation to the novela negra genre.

In the following essay, Mull reviews some of Valenzuela's characteristic thematic concerns, motifs, and stylistic techniques through a close reading of "Rituals of Rejection," which demonstrates her "insistence on breaking apart, altering, and/or combining traditional words in untraditional ways."

In the following essay, Fores examines diverse ways language, or the word, performs in Cat-O-Nine-Deaths.

In the essay below, Bach provides an overview of Valenzuela's life and works.

Below, Rubio discusses the fragmentary nature of Valenzuela's writings, focusing on her narrative procedures, themes, characterizations, discourse, and word-play.

Unquestionably, one of the most characteristic qualities of Valenzuela's prose is the plurality to which Cortázar has referred [see excerpt above], for her work inevitably offers or even demands a multiplicity of readings and interpretations. At times deceptively simple, always subtly political and/or feminist but never sententious, her prose rarely offers solutions to the problems it posits, for that is not her intent. Instead, her work examines life, reality and sociopolitical structures fro...

In the review below, Stavans reads autobiographical aspects of Valenzuela's life into Bedside Manners.

In the following review, Nimtz details the themes of Black Novel and Valenzuela's oeuvre in general, especially in relation to the author's provocative use of language.

In the essay below, Araújo explains the relation between the feminine body and language in terms of the violence and degradation depicted in Other Weapons.

Below, Januzzi offers a favorable review of Black Novel, remarking that "the text is so well constructed that it provides a tight alibi for her sense of language as a secretion."

In the review below, Gold claims that The Lizard's Tail suffers from Valenzuela's lack of focus on her subjects, stating that she "broods about making magic too much to be able to make the magic."

In the following review, Thornton admits that "readers who admire fiction that celebrates its own making will be drawn to Black Novel."

In the following review, Harris emphasizes the theatrical aspect of Black Novel.

In the following review of Open Door, Horvath summarizes the themes and techniques of Valenzuela's short stories.

In the following review, Hernández comments on Valenzuela's verbal wit, black humor, and the Argentine vision of magic realism in The Lizard's Tail.

In the review below, Agosin focuses on the Argentinian themes of Black Novel.

Maybe Luisa Valenzuela is not, as her American publishers allege, "one of Argentina's foremost writers and journalists," but if she is even close to that, Buenos Aires is no place for anyone to point his cultural telescope at in hopes of seeing anything new. "Strange Things Happen Here," which attempts nothing if not being up-to-date, is a collection of very short stories and an interminable short novel: "One more person dead in the city. It's getting to be a...

In the review below, Hopkinson briefly recounts the themes, style, and plots of Open Door.

In the following review, Miller maintains that the "overlapping of military and personal struggles is what makes Bedside Manners so appealing."

"The Lizard's Tail" by Luisa Valenzuela is an exotic roman à clef based loosely on the life of José López Rega, one of Isabel Perón's despotic ministers. Yet much more than fictionalized biography, the novel is a baroque and parodistic fantasy centered on and in the mind of a nameless mad Sorcerer. In this plotless, rambling and episodic novel, Miss Valenzuela attempts to plumb the depths of unmitigated evil by examining the Sorcerer's frenzied ...

Considering the political content of several of the twenty-six short stories and of the last segment of the novel included in [Strange Things Happen Here], the present regime of Argentina would appear to be less repressive than Luisa Valenzuela … herself represents it…. The obscurity of the novel [He Who Searches] cannot be attributed to the translation but rather to a style reminiscent of Carlos Fuentes' Where the Air is Clear or García Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solit...

Below, Long finds Strange Things Happen Here "stranger than strange," noting that fear and paranoia permeate the collection.

After a long period during which Argentine literature (and Latin American literature in general) was almost always cast in molds imposed by foreign examples or by internal limitations, we have been witnessing over the past thirty years the appearance of creativity that is at last free, at last our own. But, as always happens in times of liberation, many of the new writers have fallen too easily into the trap of exaggeration and verbal libertinism…. Little by little, however, we are beginning to map p...

Some of the stories [in Strange Things Happen Here] aren't half a page long; two pages is average. Mostly they're finished before we know what they're up to. There's one about a woman in a bus who picks the pocket of a man who feels her ass. It's well done, but it's over in a paragraph. What did we miss? The point, obviously. There's one about a pampas thistle that "thrives in a city that has eradicated green by decree," "a prickly, ugly ...

The Lizard's Tail opens with a narrative stylistically similar to the Benjy section of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Details and shreads of insight seem never to fuse. Each sentence starts a string of thoughts which remain dangling, unknotted by the paragraph's end. And understandably, this makes for frustrating reading. Faulkner's narrator is an idiot; Valenzuela's is a messianic maniac, a Sorcerer and witchdoc. (p. 287)

The Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela … is what, after due apologies, still may be called a women's novelist; talkative, impulsive and full of unexpected turns in the flow of her stories. Her earlier work was regarded highly: the novels Hay que sonreír (1966) and Como en la guerra (1977); the short-story collections Los heréticos (1967), Aquí pasan cosas raras (1975) and Libro que no muerde (1980)…. (p. 438) [Cambio de armas] contains five stories of varying length....

The historical events gaudily disguised and deeply interred in ["The Lizard's Tail"], while recognizable enough, must be gleaned from the swirling, spiraling masses of language, image, metaphor, folklore, imaginative conceit, hallucination. One by one the events are exhumed: Eva (the "Venerated Dead Woman"); Isabel (the "Intruder" or "Madame President"); the Generalissimo; the succession of brutal, absurd, strutting, bloody-minded colonels and g...

Although the collection [Strange Things Happen Here] is prosaically subtitled "Twenty-six Short Stories and a Novel," it comprises a variety of forms, from single-page sketches to a novella-length fiction [He Who Searches] that shifts scene and point of view with unnerving abandon. Throughout, these pieces offer a surrealistic picture of life in a fascist state. Though the themes of the stories vary from sex Luisa Valenzuela 1938– Photograph by Layle Silb...