This is the most brilliant and celebrated book of short stories by a master of the form.

    From the exasperated metaphor of human relationships that is "La autopista del sur" through the masterpiece that is "El otro cielo," Cortazar once again paves the way to stories that are a must-read for lovers of the story genre in general. "La salud de los enfermos," "Reunión," "La señorita Cora," "La isla a mediodía," "Instrucciones para John Howell," and "Todos los fuegos el fuego" are a celebration of intelligence, passion, and genius.

    It was inspired by his journey to Macchu Picchu, the Peruvian Inca city high in the Andes. Neruda's journey takes on all the symbolic qualities of a personal venture into the interior as the poem progresses, exploring both the roots of the poet's identity and the history of Latin America.This translation has been rendered by the distinguished poet Nathaniel Tarn and is presented in a bilingual edition, with the Spanish and English texts on facing pages.

    His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.

    In the wake of his father's premature death, Jose Cemi comes of age in a turn of the century Cuba described in the Washington Post as "an island paradise where magic and philosophy twist the lives of the old Cuban bourgeoisie into extravagant wonderful shapes."

    Fray Servando--priest, blasphemer, dueler of monsters, irresistible lover, misunderstood prophet, prisoner, and consummate escape artist--wanders among the vice-ridden populations of eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas, fleeing dungeons, a marriage-minded woman, a slave ship captain, and the Inquisition. Whether by burro, by boat, or by the back of a whale, Fray Servando's journey is at once funny and romantic, melancholy and profound--a tale rooted in history, yet outrageously hallucinatory."An impenitent amalgam of truth and invention, historical fact and outrageous make-believe . . . a philosophical black comedy."--The New York Times

    From his arrival there in the late 1930s to his death in 1973, Isla Negra became a text that unraveled in a series of images fundamental to an understanding of his work. Renowned documentary photographer Rogovin’s photographs were taken in Isla Negra at the suggestion of Neruda himself. The poems and photographs reveal the landscape of Isla Negra as well as the home into which Neruda put so much of himself. This volume is issued to celebrate the centennial of the Nobel Prize winning poet’s birth.

    The recurring themes of these stories - entrapment and search for the self, art versus life, and the mythic aspects of existence - are presented against the background of rural and urban life in northeast Brazil. The stylistic devices of the accessible tales (frequent shifts of tense, long sentences full of parenthetical clauses, heavy punctuation and inversions, and use of graphic symbols to suggest shifts in narrative perspective) all contribute to the multiplicity of meaning and significance of these very human stories.