David Bowles Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico El Paso, Texas. Cinco Puntos Press. 2018. 368 pages. We are always revisiting our myths. In Europe and America, attention to myth has historically bolstered claims to national and (white) racial greatness by drawing on the heritage of the robust mythic and folkloric traditions of Ireland, Scandinavia, France, Germany, Russia, and others transmitted orally and written down in epics and sagas, or penned by the fairy-tale collectors of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Today, a vast field spanning both popular and literary fiction attends to Nota Bene Short Circuits: Aphorisms, Fragments, and Literary Anomalies Ed. James Lough & Alex Stein Schaffner Press Following James Lough and Alex Stein’s Short Flights, an anthology of short-form writing, Short Circuits has expanded its scope beyond that of its predecessor to include such writing as flash fiction, mini-essays, and concrete poetry. The collection strives to give readers a series of “little enlightenments ” in an effort to rewire the brain for the reader’s own well-being. Maria José Silveira Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters Trans. Eric M. B. Becker Open Letter Translated from Portuguese, Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters traces back five hundred years of Brazilian history and the history of a family through the women of that family, starting with a Tupiniquim warrior in 1500 and ending with a woman in 2001. While critical of the aspects of culture that oppress women, Silveira’s powerful, vivid prose details the ways in which these women are the bedrock of society. WORLDLIT.ORG 89 continued retellings, pastiches, and subversions of the Euro-American myths; most recently, Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman won acclaim for their retellings of Norse mythology and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. Rarely, outside of Pantheon’s uneven Fairy Tale and Folklore Library, have the mythofolkloric traditions of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the indigenous Americas been given similar treatment. Enter David Bowles, Mexican American novelist and translator of Nahuatl and Mayan. Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky is the most recent of Bowles’s several books that bring the folktales, myths, and poetry of Mesoamerican cultures to anglophone and hispanophone readers. With Feathered Serpent, Bowles has given us a rich, vast, and complexly woven tapestry of the heritage of stories that circulated in pre-Conquest Mexico. It is a compulsively readable account of the history of the “sea-ringed world” of Mexico from the formation of the very first entity, the dual god Ometeotl, out of the eternal life force of the universe, down through the creation of the many generations of gods and the four ages of human beings (all destroyed by infighting among the gods), and to the present of the fifth age of humans molded by Feathered Serpent, Divine Mother, and the many gods from the ground bones of the humans who came before. A masterful storyteller, Bowles packs the richness of the Mesoamerican cosmos into every sentence , bringing to vivid life ancient characters who are by turns funny, heartbreaking, lovable, grotesque, and venerable. The book divides its history of the universe into seven sections that narrate the epochs of Mexico up to the conquest. The first three are cosmogony: how the gods and the order of things came to be, including a wealth of etiologies, from ultimate concerns with the purpose of human and animal sacrifice or the sanctity behind sacred sites; to natural and animal phenomena, like animal morphologies and habits; and the ordering of time, causes of eclipses, or spots on the moon (these caused by Feathered Serpent hurling a rabbit at the moon). At the heart of the story of the gods is the conflict between Feathered Serpent, creator and protector of humankind, and his brother, Heart of Sky (Hurricane/Tezcatlipoca), a tortured, jealous deity who seeks to destroy the people of Mexico in every age. The final four sections tell of the human world, the world after the “Reign of the Demigods” and the exploits of great heroes, like the trickster Lord Opossum, Maya twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, Mixtec archer Yacoñooy, and Aztec warrior Huitzilopochtli. These sections narrate the rise and fall...