Extract

PART II Fiction Women Narrative Writers in Print: Facts and Fictions Mercedes Queixas Zas Galician Fiction: A Genre with Gender? A publisher is the last in the line of friendly hands that delivers us the gift of literary creation; it is the tailor dressed to the nines, fictive or otherwise; the last step in ascending to the pleasures of the word —poetic, narrative, scholarly, dramatized— on the public stage where our need to tell stories is clothed at last in printed or digital form. And all with a dash of modesty, out of our respect for readers to whom we offer a personal and complex conception of the space-time of our immediate or imagined reality, interpreted according to other imaginaries from times past or —daringly— from times to come. As publishers, we give body to the soul that first appeared to us as thoughts woven in the communion of words, in the analepsis or prolepsis of playful time, in the circumlocutory discourse of characters, in perceived ellipses, uncovered metaphors… A publisher exports, for divergent people and worlds, and in the face of imperiously uniform aesthetic cravings, an infinity of possible ways to understand and explain ourselves with which creators, male and female, keep feeding their own culture, rhythmically keying in pages and screens that were initially empty. Publishers’ catalogues also give visibility to the writers who breathe life into a literary corpus, those who make it real or, at least, tangible. However, if we analyse the world of Galician fiction...