Cuentos de amigas

After Madres e hijas, this new anthology of stories, edited by Laura Freixas, explores another crucial realm of experience for women: their friendships. Cuentos de amigas includes already published stories by some of the most important female Spanish writers of the 20th century: Rosa Chacel, Carmen Martín Gaite, Josefina Aldecoa, Cristina Peri Rossi, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Soledad Puértolas, Nuria Amat, Lucía Etxebarria and Espido Freire. Others have written stories especially for this book, including Esther Tusquets, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Clara Sánchez, Juana Salabert, Flavia Company and Luisa Castro. These stories are about confidences, lovers and neighbours whose friendships are compromised by class difference… but mainly they are about friends, with all that that entails in terms of love, support and admiration; but also rivalry, obsessions and betrayal. Is this book ‘women’s fiction’? Yes: in the sense that the work of these writers has re-shaped the history of literature by giving female characters the presence that they had never had before. It is ‘women’s fiction’, then, but not fiction ‘about women’ or ‘for women’: this is a book for everyone, man or woman.