Best of
Latin-American

1998

The Savage Detectives


Roberto Bolaño - 1998
    Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

In the Land of God and Man: A Latin Woman's Journey


Silvana Paternostro - 1998
    She left Latin America twenty years ago, but recently returned to look critically at our Church, our Constitution, our daily lives. Told in a lyrical and personal voice, but backed up by solid research, In the Land of God and Man draws a new map of Latin and Latino America -- from Quito, Ecuador to Queens, New York -- exposing its hidden cultural undercurrents and bringing women out of the factories and favelas, the brothels and the boardrooms, and allowing them to tell their own stories.

José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas


José Martí - 1998
    Martí transformed rebellion into revolution. . . . Like a master weaver, Martí pulled together all the separate threads of Cuban discontent—social, economic, political, racial, historical—and wove them into a radical movement of enormous force.”—Louis A. Pérez Jr, author of José Martí in the United States “Oh Cuba! . . . the blood of Martí was not yours alone; it belonged to an entire race, to an entire continent; it belonged to the powerful youth who have lost probably the best of teachers; he belonged to the future!”—Rubén Darío This new edition of an elegant anthology features bilingual poetry, a revised translation, and several new pieces. It presents the full breadth of José Martí’s work: his political essays and writings on culture, his letters, and his poetry. Readers will discover a literary genius and an insightful political commentator on troubled US-Latin America relations.

Cuentos Escogidos


Mario Benedetti - 1998
    From the anti-bureaucratic stories that characterized him at first to the ingenious and intensive texts he has published recently. A bonus is the narration of Benedetti, as he tells a story the way only he can!

Neruda at Isla Negra


Pablo Neruda - 1998
    From his arrival there in the late '30s to his death in 1973, Isla Negra became a text that unraveled in a series of essential images that are fundamental to an understanding of his mature work.

The Latino(a) Condition: A Critical Reader


Richard Delgado - 1998
    This has been the case with American Latinos(as), as evidenced by demeaning media stereotypes and lack of recognition in other areas. Here, Latinos(as) in major professional fields are speaking back.

Frigid Tales


Pedro De-Jesús - 1998
    In this tour de force of alienation and transgression, he captures the disaffected existence of a certain segment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters on the fringes of contemporary Cuban society"The new Reinaldo Arenas."—El País"All of the stories in Cuentos frigidos are very interesting and imaginative, full of dark humor and subtle insights." —Emilio Bejel, author of Gay Cuban Nation"Sex is a preoccupation and, as the King of Siam would say, 'a puzzlement' in this debut collection of six coy, elusive stories from a young Cuban fiction writer . . . witty and accomplished." —Kirkus Reviews"Despite the title, there is nothing frigid about these tales--what appears to be coldness is all on the surface. True, the characters of these six interrelated stories are often uncomfortable with their sexuality and sometimes believe they would be happier if they weren't so horny all the time, and true, too, Pedro de Jesus makes use of the cerebral and distancing forms of postmodern fiction, although he cannot resist descending into a realism he has been taught to disparage--in short, the stories are the product of a young man who believes that his libido is getting in the way of his art but nevertheless cannot hide his old-fashioned passion for love stories." —The Review of Contemporary FictionPedro de Jesús was born in 1970 in Fomento, Cuba and studied at the University of Havana. In addition to writing short stories, de Jesús has published essays, and a novel, Síbilas en Mercaderes. Frigid Tales has been published in Spain and his work has appeared in anthologies in Germany, France, and Italy.Dick Cluster is the author of Obligations of the Bone and other fiction. He has translated Mirta Yáñez's Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women as well as Alejandro Hernádez Diaz, Sonia Rivera-Valdés, Aida Bahr, and Antonio José Ponte.