His extravagant and hopeless undertakings, his brushes with the law and scrapes with death, and his enduring friendships and unlooked-for love affairs make him a Don Quixote for our day, driven from one place to another by a restless and irregular quest for the absolute. Álvaro Mutis's seven dazzling chronicles of the adventures and misadventures of Maqroll have won him numerous honors and a passionately devoted readership throughout the world. Here for the first time in English all these wonderful stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's prize-winning translation.

    "Poetry," he believed, "is braver than anyone."

    Because he taught me that the most haunting mysteries are those of everyday life. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

    

    Until now, however, few of his stories have been translated into English. This volume brings together fifteen stories written during the period 1952-1975, which were collected in the three volumes of La palabra del mudo. Ribeyro's stories treat the social problems brought about by urban expansion, including poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, class struggles, alienation, and violence. At the same time, elements of the fantastic playfully interrupt some of the stories. As Ribeyro's characters become swept up in circumstances beyond their understanding, we see that the only freedom or dignity left them comes from their own imaginations. The fifteen stories included here are "Terra Incognita," "Barbara," "The Featherless Buzzards," "Of Modest Color," "The Substitute Teacher," "The Insignia," "The Banquet," "Alienation (An Instructive Story with a Footnote)," "The Little Laid Cow," "The Jacaranda Trees," "Bottles and Men," "Nothing to Do, Monsieur Baruch," "The Captives," "The Spanish," and "Painted Papers.

    Valenzuela?s view of life captures our imagination because we know how far it is from reality - cops in Buenos Aires are not afraid of dogs, latin lovers in caf?s do make moves in the game of courtship, and the hotels in Venice overlook canals. In the tradition of Calvino and Borges, the stories of Symmetries are also subtle parables on the art of fiction - they engage both our heads and our hearts.

    But if we are patient one day they will answer us with a poplar leaf trapped in a broken mirror, with a flame that suddenly revives in the fireplace, with a dark return of birds before the glance of a girl who waits motionless on the threshold."—from "In Order to Talk with the Dead"Reared in the rainy forests of Chile's "La Frontera" region which had nurtured Pablo Neruda a generation earlier, Jorge Teillier has become one of Chile's leading contemporary poets, whose work is widely read in Latin America and Europe along with the poetry of his well-known contemporaries Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. This English-Spanish bilingual anthology now introduces English-speaking readers to Teillier, with a representative selection of his best work from all phases of his career.Carolyne Wright has translated poems from the volumes Muertes y maravillas (1971), Para un pueblo fantasma (1978), and Cartas para reinas de otras primaveras (1985). Avoiding the bravura effects of some of his contemporaries, Teillier writes from a life lived directly and simply, returning time and again in his poetry to the timeless and mythic South of his boyhood, the "Land of Nevermore."