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4th out of 98 books
—
35 voters
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
A collection of stories, whose characters give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border. The women in these stories offer tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
Paperback, 192 pages
Published
March 3rd 1992
by Vintage
(first published 1991)
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I requested from my partner a book from his library that he recommended. Our personal libraries have little crossover, because why buy a book the other already had if the libraries just going to be combined in a year, and since I would not be seeing him for several months I wanted to read something from his library before I no longer had access. He selected this book, saying that I'd really enjoy it. And I did, I really did.
The stories in this thin volume are short, but the pack a big punch. The...more
The stories in this thin volume are short, but the pack a big punch. The...more
I love this book. Here's one of the short stories, titled "Bread"
"We were hungry. We went into a bakery on Grand Avenue and bought bread. Filled the backseat. The whole car smelled of bread. Big sourdough loaves shaped like a fat ass. Fat-ass bread, I said in Spanish, Nalgona bread. Fat – ass bread, he said in Italian, but I forget how he said it.
We ripped big chunks with our hands and ate. The car a pearl blue like my heart that afternoon. Smell of warm bread, bread in both fists, a tango on th...more
"We were hungry. We went into a bakery on Grand Avenue and bought bread. Filled the backseat. The whole car smelled of bread. Big sourdough loaves shaped like a fat ass. Fat-ass bread, I said in Spanish, Nalgona bread. Fat – ass bread, he said in Italian, but I forget how he said it.
We ripped big chunks with our hands and ate. The car a pearl blue like my heart that afternoon. Smell of warm bread, bread in both fists, a tango on th...more
Sandra Cisneros is a local San Antonio author. I had read a couple of her short stories that appear in this collection, and thoroughly enjoyed them, so I decide to read the whole book. All of the stories are extremely powerful and emotional, promoting female strength and embodiment. The stories are also strongly centered around love and the way people will have lasting impressions on our souls through various interactions.
I gave this book three stars as a whole. I prefer Sandra Cisneros' shor...more
I gave this book three stars as a whole. I prefer Sandra Cisneros' shor...more
I expected to like this more. I really enjoyed her poetry collection "My Wicked Wicked Ways." I recommend people check it out. However, this collection of short stories were bland to me. Can Cisneros write beautifully? Yes, she can. But these stories are don't have much plot driving them. Some of them are simply vignettes. The collection's literary value comes from the variety of Chicana experience it includes. There are many different women here. However, a man is central to almost all of them...more
Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek is a great story that touches on the serious issue of domestic abuse across the world. Cisneros' way of explaining Cleofila's lifestyle is one which relates to the soap operas which she wishes her life was like. She hopes to have a perfect relationship with her husband Juan Pedro. However, he abuses her and doesn't allow her to include her own opinions in their relationship, which discourages her from staying with him. She plans to leave the home she lives...more
Feb 10, 2012
Claudefang
added it
“Woman Hollering Creek” explores the human condition from the perspective of a fragile feminine stereotype, a woman who leaves her home in Mexico and marries into an abusive relationship, which is very often happening these days. In the story, as her original fantasies of the married life are put to an end, she realizes that she must act independently of her husband to be able to live a happier life by leaving him. By finding strength in other feminine influences, she manages to escape back to M...more
“Woman Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros is a story about a woman and her trials in her life. This book shifts between outlooks and perspectives. Sometimes shown between displaying life in a rose tinted lens, through what the main character, Cleofilas, sees as a “telenovela” tv-based reality, and the all too dark truth that her life is in actuality.
What is given here, upon looking at the story and its segments in a whole, is a collection of voices. Each voice is a representation of a differe...more
What is given here, upon looking at the story and its segments in a whole, is a collection of voices. Each voice is a representation of a differe...more
I liked this story because of Cisneros' way of describing Cleofila's abusive life like the telenovelas that she looks up to. She aspires for a glamorous, soap opera-like life with her husband Juan Pedro, yet he is an abusive man who breaks down her self confidence. She wants to escape from her life and take her children with her, but she can't do that without offending her violent life partner. This story sheds light on a serious, taboo topic that should be addressed to explain to readers the im...more
Feb 10, 2012
Alissa
added it
Sandra Cisneros in her short story “Women Hollering Creek” exposes all the sadness of a young woman’s life and entwines it with a meandering creek. The main character, Cleófilas, first crosses the creek when she is exiled to Texas with her new husband. It comes to be reflective of her new life as she ponders whether the woman that the arroyo represents is hollering as the result of pain or rage. In the new village no one seems to care about her and no one shares her interest in the name. When sh...more
Woman Hollering Creek is definitely a story that continues to confuse me. When I first read it I sensed drama, action, and raw emotion. But after some discussion and reading it again I realized that’s exactly what it needed to be. I found it not that hard to connect with Cleofilas, even though she was delusional that her life was one day going to be like the telenovas she spoke of so much. I felt for her in that her life was turning out the way she had planned it to be for many years. As a woman...more
Feb 10, 2012
Samk808
added it
It is very interesting to see the difference between the fantasy life that Cleofilas had planned through her soap operas, and the reality of her life with her abusive husband. With no mother to base what a relationship should look like on, Cleofilas has this romanticized vision of a passionate love that lasts forever. But the reality is that her husband is nothing like what she envisioned he should be. I think that the moment it finally occurs to her that her life is not like a telenovela is the...more
Sandra Cisneros Woman Hollering Creek is about a young girl named Cleofilas who just recently got married to a man named Juan Pedro. The story itself was very confusing at first but as I began to read it, you meet a girl who is trying to live the life of a soap opera but seems to be stuck in what people would consider reality. As a reader you first come across this when Juan Pedro strikes Cleofilas for the first time, when he hits her she expected to run off crying like they do in the shows but...more
One of the things that I found the most appealing about Woman Hollering Creek was how the main character, Cliofìlas’, perspective on life mirrored how she watched her favorite soap operas. The first hint at this writing style can be seen at how the story is broken up into different stories that happened to her, much like how episodes are formatted on television. Cliofìlas lacks the perspective to see this chain of events as a major issue in her marriage, therefore separating them into their own...more
Feb 09, 2012
Nina autajay
added it
Cisneros has a similar style of writing as that of Cormack McCarthy. In the very intense moments of the story, she uses no quotation marks making it easier for the reader to read through the action. However, it’s hard to tell who is speaking a lot of the time. This reflects how Cleofilas sees her reality. She watches the telenovelas that portray love and romance as an aspect of everyday life. When she is confronted with the fact that her marriage was in no way what the telenovelas sought marriag...more
Very lyrical and suggestive of not just immigrant women, but of women as a whole. She suggests sisterhood with Felice and Graciela, and that men are not justified in any way to suggest that women have nothing to do with their own daily lives. Keeping house is not as easy as it looks, and Juan Pedro's audacity to even suggest that Cleofilas is too ignorant to even comprehend the own work he does is simply unjust. He himself is not perfect, and I think it picks up on and highlights the fact that m...more
I love how blunt the narrators of the various stories are. Even when the narrator is doing or saying terrible things, there's something about her that is still likable even as you hate her. Her strength and rebellious attitude, mixed with the vulnerability she sometimes reveals, makes her a fascinating character. Sometimes I want to be her, other times I want to be her best friend, and then once in awhile I don't even like her at all.
"And it's not the last time I've slept with a man the night h...more
"And it's not the last time I've slept with a man the night h...more
Feb 10, 2012
Yashira Avendano
added it
Coming from a Hispanic descendant, reading Women Hollering Creek was like watching a novela on the television. It was alike in many ways since watching telenovelas is like watching something fantasy that the end is predicted and written in a script such as reading this story. This story started off having a bright side and slowly changed into a bad and dark story. The main character Cleofila sees everything as a fairytale. Most of the story is broken down into short stories and episodes such as...more
I found myself unable to stop reading "Woman Hollering Creek", as throughout the entire text I was waiting for Cliofilas to break out of the "spell" that the telenovelas had cast over her life, which had caused her to stay in an abusive relationship. However, even though we find the protagonist oppressed by the men in her life, the story itself takes a very feminist approach. We can assume that the narrator of the story is a woman, and by doing this, indirectly, Cisneros is setting up a woman t...more
Feb 10, 2012
Gardner
added it
After taking a class in south american literature and how it mirrored the social uprising and oppression, this text was especially interesting to me. The protagonist is a woman abused by her husband, who views life as a soap opera, the events in her life mirroring episodes in a TV show.
One of the most interesting aspects of the text is how the narrator changes. It is never in the first person of the woman, however at certain points of the text, the 3rd person narration is almost first person....more
One of the most interesting aspects of the text is how the narrator changes. It is never in the first person of the woman, however at certain points of the text, the 3rd person narration is almost first person....more
'Salvador with eyes the color of caterpillar, Salvador of the crooked hair and crooked teeth, Salvador whose name the teacher cannot remember, is a boy who is no one's friend, runs along somewhere in that vague direction where homes are the color of bad weather, lives behind a raw doorway, shakes the sleep brothers awake, ties their shoes, combs their hair with water, feeds them milk and corn flakes from a tin cup in the dim dark of the monring.' From a short story called Salvador Late or Early....more
I wish I liked this since so many people I respect sing its praises. Instead of being drawn into Cisneros's voice or themes, I found the execution of the stories to be largely frustrating. Cisneros likes to use lists in her stories, lists of sounds, lists of items for sale at the grocery, lists of things that remind her of a child's ear, etc. For me, this got old very quickly, and became a huge distraction from whatever the story was. I wanted to like her insight into Mexican-American culture. I...more
This is my favourite fact about Sandra Cisneros: she bought a house in San Antonio, Texas and painted it purple, which caused uproar in the neighbourhood.
When I grow up, I want to be Sandra Cisneros. I want to be a great writer; paint my house an obnoxious colour; and court other people's hatred.
Anyway.
This collection of short stories is, like many collections of short stories, a bit of a mixed bag. Most of the stories revolve around poor Latina women, touching upon themes of romance, religion a...more
When I grow up, I want to be Sandra Cisneros. I want to be a great writer; paint my house an obnoxious colour; and court other people's hatred.
Anyway.
This collection of short stories is, like many collections of short stories, a bit of a mixed bag. Most of the stories revolve around poor Latina women, touching upon themes of romance, religion a...more
1 like · like · see review
Feb 18, 2012
Rhett Ramirez
added it
This story is a tragic story of a woman leaving her family to come to the United States with a husband from a what seems like arranged marriage. I think that this story is less about their journey into the US, but a story of their abusive relationship, and her yearning to have a life that is not her own. She compares every aspect of her life to a soap opera, and is yearning to have a life of that status. She seems to make everything in her life seem more glamorous than it is, because she is desp...more
So many stories in this book are absolute art. There are perhaps two or three tales that did not grip me, but otherwise I have read all the others at least five times over the years. Cisneros truly found her voice here - poetic, hypnotic, erotic storytelling with multi-cultural and feminist undertones. I truly envy her gift in this collection.
This collection of short stories takes place along both sides of the Texas/Mexico border. They mostly feature tales of everyday people, some too short to even feature what could be called a plot, that fit together to create a mosaic-like depiction of life in the region. However, it was the stories that deviated from that that I found most captivating, particularly the one told from the point of view of the wife of Emiliano Zapata. When I read something that is supposed to embody a literary tradi...more
I loved The House on Mango Street, so I was looking forward to reading this collection of short stories by Cisneros, who has an amazing talent for imagery. It helps to be familiar with Latino culture when reading Cisneros, who is of Mexican decent, because she peppers her stories with references to the Latino way of life.
My favorite story in the collection is "Eleven" in which the author writes: "What they don't understand about birthdays & what they never tell you is that when you're eleven...more
My favorite story in the collection is "Eleven" in which the author writes: "What they don't understand about birthdays & what they never tell you is that when you're eleven...more
Nov 25, 2008
Jason
rated it
1 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
only die-hard Cisneros fans, or people that get blown away by creative descriptions...
I finally finished Sandra Cisneros’ short story collection. I was surprised that it took me a few weeks to read, since it’s only about 200 pages long. For some reason, I just could not get rolling with this book. It’s a collection of short stories by the acclaimed writer and poet, mostly set in the Latino areas of San Antonio, Texas, that I thought would rock my world like House on Mango Street or My Wicked, Wicked Ways.
Cisneros does some wonderful descriptive work. She can paint beautiful, hea...more
Cisneros does some wonderful descriptive work. She can paint beautiful, hea...more
This story follows a woman who is continually oppressed by not only the world around her, but the one she loves most, her husband. At times I found the story to be a little choppy jumping between segments, but when I thought about it. This story follows her life like one of the telenovelas she describes. Each piece being a different episode. Only in this story, it doesn't seem to always work out so well for Cleofilas. I found this to be an interesting read. It wasn't the most exciting of stories...more
Cisneros was one of my first introductions to language used in this lyrical way. I fell in love with Cisneros, particarly "BBQ" and "Ten," from her House on Mango Street.
I read this collection of short stories during my women in literature class in college. Each story offers an amazing tale. Every woman (and man) should read this.
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Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and the American Book Award, and of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. Cisneros is the author of two novels The House on Mango Street and Caramelo; a collection of short...more
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Jul 20, 2012 04:02pm