In the following essay, Wyers analyzes the relationship between Puig's El Beso de la mujer araña and the movies.

In the following essay, Cosgrove analyzes two Argentine novels, Puig's El beso de la mujer araña and Julio Cortázar's Rayuela, in terms of their opposition to the notion that “novels should be enabling vehicles for presenting fictional worlds of coherence and stability.”

In the following interview, Puig discusses questions of sexuality and repression raised by his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman.

In the following essay, Davies discusses the role of psychoanalytic theory and gender conflict in Puig's Pubis angelical. He concludes that “Though Puig trifles with the conventions and mocks the excesses of psychoanalytic and feminist discourses, he does not repudiate them. …”

In the following essay, Zimmerman traces the role of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Puig's Pubis Angelical.

In the following essay, Paul analyzes the use of illness as a sign in Puig's Pubis angelical.

In the following interview, which was conducted in September 1979, Puig discusses his career as a writer and the various influences on his work.

In the following essay, Issacharoff and Madrid discuss the use of myth, stereotypes, and repetition in Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman and Under a Mantle of Stars, as well as in Eugène Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve.

In the following essay, Jozee traces Puig's narrative technique and the author's presentation of myth in his work.

In the following essay, Hall traces the influence of filmmakers Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang on Puig's work.

In the following essay, Cheever asserts that “the bleak and frigid physical landscape” of Part III of Puig's Pubis Angelical “is an appropriate metaphor for the moral atmosphere of the ‘polar age’ of human sexuality.”

In the following essay, Cheever analyzes how the reader is to interpret the place of dreams in Puig's Pubis Angelical, concluding that “we may either force Puig's text to tell us that beautiful things do not exist, or we may allow it to show us that they do.”

In the following essay, Lewis studies the readers' role in Puig's Sangre de amor correspondido, and how their interaction with the text affects the novel's message.

In the following essay, Thompson discusses Puig's use of popular forms in Boquitas pintadas and how the substance of the texts subverts those forms.

In the following interview, Puig discusses the movie adaptation of his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman and his work as both a screenwriter and a novelist.

In the following essay, Karetnikova and Barber trace the role film has in the structure and content of Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman.

In the following interview, Puig discusses how he began his career in the film industry before becoming a novelist.

In the following review, Christ praises Puig's accomplishment in The Buenos Aires Affair, but complains that the English translation “frequently goes flat.”

In the following review, De Feo lauds Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth as “a funny, poignant, perceptive piece of fiction which is not overwhelmed by its adventurous techniques.”

In his three novels, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Heartbreak Tango and The Buenos Aires Affair, Puig has shown an incrementing skill, range of perception and control of varying emotions…. If the promise of these books is kept by Puig's next novel, and if he continues to be productive, Puig will show himself not only as a good writer getting better but as a major author. Puig's novels exhibit their growth in a double sense. First of all, the maturation is evident in the subject matter. His...

[Recent Latin American fiction is] constantly in search of new stances, angles, tones, twists, and modes of narrative, but it asks these discoveries to lead it back to a shared world, not off into a region of pure play or dream. The work of Manuel Puig is a good example, since in his four novels he evokes or simulates, among other things, soap operas, school essays, sentimental letters, police reports, the novels of Robbe-Grillet, newspaper items, film scripts, tapes of telephone conversations, the later ch...

Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages is, like Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, developed almost entirely as a splintered colloquy between two unlikely companions. It is also, like the earlier novel, a structural failure, and for much the same reason: the conclusion, disastrously, comments on and "explains" an otherwise richly ambivalent and mysterious text. It is as if Puig lost his nerve and decided, for whatever reason, to serve that famous "general audience,...

In the following review, De Feo offers a tempered assessment of Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair.

Manuel Puig is a Marxist and the United States is, after all, the major stronghold of world capitalism, its inhabitants stupefied and/or morally decayed, the rich by too much and the poor by too little; everyone is a victim in some sense. Still, Puig is also a Freudian. He knows—as the protagonist [of Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages], a 74-year-old Argentine expatriate named Juan José Ramirez, tells his interlocutor, 36-year-old Larry John—that "There's a partic...

In the following review, Butt lauds Puig's Tropical Night Falling, asserting, “It has a gentle wit that recalls his finest pages, but it also displays a simplicity and lightness of touch which suggest that it could have inaugurated a rich third phase in his writing.”

Technically, ["Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages"] is a tour de force. Except for a handful of letters at the end to sew up the plot, it consists entirely of dialogue between its only two speaking characters. They are Juan Jose Ramirez, an old and ailing Latin-American political leader in exile in Manhattan, and Lawrence John, a cynical young New York graduate student (a sort of careerist grad student) who has been hired to push Ramirez on wheelchair outings in the city.

The appearance of Manuel Puig's new novel, The Buenos Aires Affair, is especial cause for celebration, not only because the book makes for fascinating reading, but also because it demonstrates that its already highly accomplished author continues to take chances and to grow as an artist. In his two previous novels, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and Heartbreak Tango, Puig explored, in a somewhat campy, comic manner, the dreams and obsessions of a host of provincial Argentine characters whose speech and li...

As in Puig's previous experiments, [in "Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages"] things are not as simple as they first seem. The only way Mr. Ramirez can recover a sense of his own life is to plumb Larry's past and his fantasies. What Mr. Ramirez is really seeking is some key to his own subconscious. At first the self-serving Larry is reluctant to indulge his often exasperating patient except when humoring him appears to be expedient. Gradually, though, Larry becomes caught ...

The most encouraging recent arrival on the Latin American literary scene has been that of Manuel Puig. His two novels, La traición de Rita Hayworth (1969) and Boquitas pintadas (1970, Painted Little Mouths) see to express the ethos of the provincial middle classes, an enterprise that has not been successfully attempted before in Latin American writing. His characters are usually rootless sons of immigrants who, for lack of a viable tradition of their own, have relied on what to many may seem a curiou...

If [the] insistent use of unedited dialogue tends to make ["Kiss of the Spider Woman"] read a bit like a radio script …, it is Mr. Puig's fascination with old movies that largely provides its substance and ultimately defines its plot, its shape. What we hear are the voices of two suffering men, alone and often in the dark, but what we see are panther women and zombies, exquisite Nazi heroines and radical racing drivers, exotic settings (a lot of finely perceived detail, especiall...

Readers aware of La traición de Rita Hayworth and El beso de la mujer araña will find similar sexual and political considerations in [Pubis angelical]. Mexico City is the setting; the female Argentine protagonist Ana, who is in a hospital there, suffers the psychological and political repercussions of having experienced most of her life in contemporary Argentina. The substance of the novel consists of her discussions with two other characters concerning this past, her diary and her private fan...

The Argentine writer, Manuel Puig, is one of the most consistently interesting novelists to have emerged anywhere during the past 10 years. "The Buenos Aires Affair," his third novel … is, like "Betrayed by Rita Hayworth" and "Heartbreak Tango" before it, a sustained bravura performance by a writer keenly conscious of how both the novel as a literary form and the kinds of people who are its best subjects have been caught up in the clichés of popular cu...

Puig is a master of narrative craftsmanship, but [Kiss of the Spider Woman] is no mere concoction. Every subtlety of character and situation—and there are many, as the relationship between the two men develops and changes—is conveyed by dialogue, and conveyed fully. The economy of means mirrors the cell's constriction. There is no exposition at all; the police documents we are given in the middle of the book only confirm what we have inferred already. Yet except for Molina's stor...