Best of
Latin-American

1994

The Massacre at El Mozote


Mark Danner - 1994
    Although reports of the massacre -- and photographs of its victims -- appeared in the United States, the Reagan administration quickly dismissed them as propaganda. In the end, El Mozote was forgotten. The war in El Salvador continued, with American funding.When Mark Danner's reconstruction of these events first appeared in The New Yorker, it sent shock waves through the news media and the American foreign-policy establishment. Now Danner has expanded his report into a brilliant book, adding new material as well as the actual sources. He has produced a masterpiece of scrupulous investigative journalism that is also a testament to the forgotten victims of a neglected theater of the cold war.

Of Love and Other Demons


Gabriel García Márquez - 1994
    Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love, and it isn't long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.

The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy


Augusto Boal - 1994
    It is Augusto Boal's bold and brilliant statement about the therapeutic ability of theatre to liberate individuals and change lives. Now translated into English and comprehensively updated from the French, Rainbow of Desire sets out the techniques which help us `see' for the first time the oppressions we have internalised. Boal, a Brazilian theatre director, writer and politician, has been confronting oppression in various forms for over thirty years. His belief that theatre is a means to create the future has inspired hundreds of groups all over the world to use his techniques in a multitude of settings. This, his latest work, includes such exercises as: * The Cops in the Head and their anti-bodies * The screen image * The image of the future we are afraid of * Image and counter-image ....and many more. Rainbow of Desire will make fascinating reading for those already familiar with Boal's work and is also completely accessible to anyone new to Theatre of the Oppressed techniques.

Hear My Testimony: Maria Teresa Tula Human Rights Activist of El Salvador


Maria Teresa Tula - 1994
    The human side of the civil war in El Salvador and decades of repression come to the fore in this woman's tale of extraordinary courage and ordinary labor.

Kiss of the Spider Woman and Two Other Plays


Manuel Puig - 1994
    This is convincing proof that Manual Puig was one of our most talented writers - no matter what the medium. Puig is the author of seven novels, translated into fourteen languages.

Selected Poetry, 1937-1990


João Cabral de Melo Neto - 1994
    Along with previously translated poems are many others in English for the first time. The remarkable group of poets and translators includes Elizabeth Bishop, Alastair Reid, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, and W. S. Merwin.

Artificial Respiration


Ricardo Piglia - 1994
    Published in Argentina in 1981, it was written at a time when thousands of Argentine citizens "disappeared" during the government’s attempt to create an authoritarian state. In part a reflection on one of the most repressive and tragic times in Argentine history, this is one of those rare works of fiction in which multiple philosophical, political, and narrative dimensions are all powerfully and equally matched. As a prize winning detective novel, Artificial Respiration reaches through many levels of mystery to explore the forces that have been at play in Argentina throughout its violent history. The narrator, a writer named Renzi, begins to look for an uncle who has vanished, a man he knows only through a web of contradictory family stories and an exchange of letters. Through these letters he learns about his uncle’s research into the life of Enrique Ossario, secretary to the 19th-century Argentine dictator Rosas and spy for the dictator’s enemy. As Renzi’s search leads further into his uncle’s work and to conversations with his literary and chess-playing friends, the reader is led by Piglia to consider the nature of Argentine identity, its literature and history, and its relation, for example, to Europe, exile, and democracy. Finally, and made most vividly appreciable by the retelling of a story in which Kafka meets Hitler, it is the encounter between literature and history that is explored.

Selected Stories


Adolfo Bioy Casares - 1994
    It is a fine introduction to one of Latin America's leading modern writers - and a choice retrospective of the master storyteller who won the 1990 Cervantes Prize, Spain's most prestigious literary award, for his lifetime work.

The Carnival Trilogy: Carnival, the Infinite Rehearsal, and the Four Banks of the River of Space


Wilson Harris - 1994
    Playing on carnival’s subversive potential in reenacting received traditions, these novels are rewritings, respectively,of Dante’s Paradiso, Goethe’s Faust, and Homer’s Odyssey. Apart from alluding to these three representative pieces of the Western literary canon, the trilogy also addresses the role of science. In passages reminiscent (in effect, if not in style) of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Harris shows how in an age of rapidly shifting analytical paradigms in the realm of science, this realm has moved ever closer qualitatively to the realm of traditional storytelling and one of its major protagonists, the Anancy trickster figure.