Francisco Goldman

CRACK OF BOOM Francisco Goldman on Ignacio Padilla ANTIPODES BY IGNACIO PADILLA, TRANSLATED BY ALASTAIR REID NEW YORK: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX. 144 PAGES. $18.

The young Mexican novelist Ignacio Padilla sets his fiction in the Germany of the world wars (as in Shadow Without a Name, his first novel to be published, last year, in English) and, in the collection of short stories now appearing here, Antipodes (published in Spanish in zooi), in a near parody world of stuffy Victorian Englishmen and far-flung colonial outposts. His friend-and cofounder of the Mexican literary movement known as "Crack" (in obvious playful echo of "Boom," as critics dubbed the emergence of Latin …