ABSTRACT
Generalizations about contemporary writing from Spanish America are neither advisable nor recommended for general use. One of the main agents in displacing the old with the new was the Argentine novelist and essayist Adolfo Bioy Casares. Born in 1914 in Buenos Aires, he found himself in such fortunate financial circumstances that he was able to dedicate himself to a writing career, with the passionate encouragement of his litterateur father. Bioy Casares's fluent manipulation of time and space is evident in "About the Shape of the World" and "The Hero of Women," but these are not "escapist" pieces; the political realities of Argentina intrude throughout. If generalizations are perforce shaky, it is nonetheless true that the North American reader does have an impression of and about contemporary fiction from Spanish America, more likely than not drawn from a recent and cursory reading of a few works of, say, Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende.
