The Heart of Fire: The Work of Rosario Castellanos Today

Rosario Castellanos’ writing is bold, commanding, and relentless: each line is inhabited like a declaration on female desire and power. The power that is missing, the power she imagines, the dream of being able to dream. The New York City International Book Fair opens its program at the Instituto Cervantes with a special event honoring Rosario Castellanos, featuring a conversation between Carmen Boullosa and Gabriela Borrelli Azara. Carmen Boullosa, an award-winning Mexican writer and scholar, author of The Book of Eva and The Book of Ana, has masterfully used the female perspective to comb against the grain of Western literary history. Gabriela Borrelli Azara, writer, scholar, and cultural promoter, author of Feminist Readings, has carried out feminist archival work that reconfigures the power dynamics that obscure, blind, and hinder women’s paths in literature. In this conversation, they explore Castellanos’ unyielding flames and soft velvets, her stellar labyrinths and earthly tricks