Competing Truths in Contemporary Latin American Literature: Narrating Otherness, Marginality, and the Politics of Representation. By Sandro R. Barros.

Competing Truths in Contemporary Latin American Literature: Narrating Otherness, Marginality, and the Politics of Representation. By Sandro R. Barros. ISBN 978-1-888205-32-9. $26.95.

The overwhelming success of the filmic adaptations of Before Night Falls by Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas, The Virgin of the Assassins by Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo, and City of God by Brazilian author Paulo Lins attracted audiences worldwide to rediscover and rethink the content of these works as enigmatic messages of disillusionment and abjection regarding the Latin American realities they promote. Competing Truths delves into the question of to what extent the fictional and autobiographical truths purported by the aforementioned bestsellers engage in the process of fixating conventional paradigms of "Third World" identity, such as poverty, violence and exclusion, as images of consumption for world audiences.