The Turquoise Ring

The nine stories gathered here as The Turquoise Ring and Other Stories, written by the Costa Rican born Rafaela Contreras, were originally published in newspapers in El ­Salvador and Guatemala during the short period between 1890-91, but never appeared in book form during the author's lifetime. Composed in an almost fairytale-like style, with approaches that suggest a proto-modernismo, in some ways her work anticipates the literary line which her husband, Rub n Dar o, would explicitly develop, but it also contains ­elements that might have taken a different direction had she lived longer, dying as she did at the early age of twenty-three, in 1893.

The present edition, translated by Jessica Sequeira, is the first English language offering of Contreras's stories, which range from fables to prose poems, from the exotic to the supernatural, and are both entertaining and moving by turns, embarking on unusual and subtle forays into different realms of human experience, in the author's own tones.