Book picks similar to
Inquieta compañía by Carlos Fuentes


méxico
horror
short-stories
carlos-fuentes

Hurricane Season


Fernanda Melchor - 2017
    And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.

Who You Think I Am


Camille Laurens - 2016
     This is the story of Claire Millecam, a forty-eight-year-old teacher and divorc�e who creates a fake social media profile to keep tabs on Joe, her occasional, elusive, and inconstant lover. Under the false identity of Claire Antunes, a young and beautiful twenty-four-year-old, she starts a correspondence with Chris--pseudonym KissChris--which soon turns into an Internet love affair.A Dangerous Liaisons for our times, Who You Think I Am exposes the disconnect between fantasy and reality. Social media allows us to put ourselves on display, to indulge in secrets, but above all to lie, to recreate a life, to become our own fiction--magnifying and manipulating the double standards to which older women are held when they refuse to give up on desire.Simultaneously sensual, intellectually stimulating, and utterly relevant, this page-turner will stick in your mind long after reading.

Repetition


Alain Robbe-Grillet - 2001
    Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret service, arrives in the ruined city and feels linked to it by a vague and recurrent memory. There is a shooting, a kidnapping, druggings, encounters with pimps and teenage whores, police interrogations, even torture. Bits and pieces of the Oedipus story resonate through the book's elegant labyrinth as Robin slowly senses that he was in Berlin before - as a child, with his mother, perhaps looking for his father. A brilliantly executed novel in prose of an almost hallucinatory richness, Repetition is proof that Robbe-Grillet's vision is, in a time of identity theft and porous nationhood, more relevant than ever.

Home Reading Service


Fabio Morábito - 2018
    Stripped of his driver’s license and feeling impotent as he nears thirty-five, he leads a dull, lonely life, chatting occasionally with the waitresses of a local restaurant or walking the streets of Cuernavaca. Once a quiet town known for its lush gardens and swimming pools, the “City of Eternal Spring” is now plagued by robberies, kidnappings, and the other myriad forms of violence bred by drug trafficking.At first, Eduardo seems unable to connect. He movingly reads the words of Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, and more, but doesn’t truly understand them. His eccentric listeners—including two brothers, one mute, who moves his lips while the other acts as ventriloquist; deaf parents raising children they don’t know are hearing; and a beautiful, wheelchair-bound mezzo soprano—sense his detachment. Then Eduardo comes across a poem his father had copied by the Mexican poet Isabel Fraire, and it affects him as no literature has before.Through these fascinating characters, like the practical, quick-witted Celeste, who intuitively grasps poetry even though she never learned to read, Fabio Morábito shows how art can help us rediscover meaning in a corrupt, unequal society.

Empire of the Atom


A.E. van Vogt - 1957
    van Vogt. First published in 1957 by Shasta Publishers in an edition of 2000 copies, the novel is a fix-up of the first five of van Vogt's Gods stories which originally appeared in Astounding magazine. The remaining Gods stories are collected in The Wizard of Linn. Author & critic James Blish observed that the plot of the Gods stories resembled that of Robert Graves' Claudius novels. The novel concerns adventures of a mutant genius in a barbaric future where spaceships are used without being understood.A Son Is BornChild of the Gods Hand of the Gods Home of the Gods The Barbarian

The Motion Demon


Stefan Grabiński - 1919
    One can feel the gust of a satanic draught from these open holes, hear the flapping, maddeningly blown-about shutters; one can almost see the spectral faces of the passengers. . . .A wandering train that appears, seemingly at will; an engine driver who is inseparable from his machine; a passenger who waits for trains but never travels on them; obsession with speed and motion; a harbinger of disaster; a daring liaison: these are the themes of The Motion Demon, Stefan Grabinski's collection of nine stories, first published in Poland in 1919.Stefan Grabinski (1887–1936), often referred to as 'The Polish Poe', struggled during his lifetime to gain recognition in his native land. He was an idealistic loner who strove for an understanding of the hidden forces of both the world and the human mind; and he represented those forces in the most potent framework available to him—his stories of the supernatural.With no one to champion him in his own land, it took until 1993 and the publication of The Dark Domain (translated by Miroslaw Lipinski) for English language readers to become truly aware of this undisputed master of original and interesting fantastic fiction.The stories of The Motion Demon are peopled by memorable characters, and even a simple railway journey offers telling clues to the metaphysical and beyond. All aboard for a unique adventure!With this first complete translation of The Motion Demon, Ash-Tree Press begins a comprehensive series of Grabinski volumes that will duplicate the content of the original Polish editions and also assemble short stories which never saw book publication. The complete series will represent the first comprehensive, collected work of Stefan Grabinski in any language.CONTENTS: Introduction by Miroslaw Lipinski; Engine Driver Grot; The Wandering Train; The Motion Demon; The Sloven; The Perpetual Passenger; In the Compartment; Signals; The Siding; Ultima Thule.

Almost Never


Daniel Sada - 2008
    It is 1945, World War II has just ended, but those bloody events have had no impact on a country that is only on the cusp of industrializing. One day, more bored than usual, Demetrio visits a bordello in search of a libidinous solution to his malaise. There he begins an all-consuming and, all things considered, perfectly satisfying relationship with a prostitute named Mireya.A letter from his mother interrupts Demetrio’s debauched idyll: she asks him to return home to northern Mexico to accompany her to a wedding in a small town on the edge of the desert. Much to his mother’s delight, he meets the beautiful and virginal Renata and quickly falls in love—a most proper kind of love.Back in Oaxaca, Demetrio is torn, the poor cad. Naturally he tries to maintain both relationships, continuing to frolic with Mireya and beginning a chaste correspondence with Renata. But Mireya has problems of her own—boredom is not among them—and concocts a story that she hopes will help her escape from the bordello and compel Demetrio to marry her. Almost Never is a brilliant send-up of Latin American machismo that also evokes a Mexico on the verge of dramatic change.

The Addams Family


Elizabeth Faucher - 1991
    

Venom


Colin Falconer - 1990
    I will survive and come back to haunt you. All of you ... A beautiful French girl and her Indian lover locked in the white heat of illicit passion. The result is Michel. Thrown out onto the dangerous streets, he grows to ferocious manhood in the alleys of Saigon.He survives to wreak the most extreme vengeance for every beating, every betrayal. Possessed of a raw sexuality and the flair of a master criminal, driven by a pitiless hidden violence, he leaves a trail of blood that stretches from the backstreets of Bombay even to the boulevards of Paris. But when the judge's gavel cracks across a Delhi courtroom and the world waits for justice, his destiny will hang on one last ironic twist of fate ... "Exotic, exciting, darkly suspenseful - a splendid novel." - Campbell Armstrong.

Lilus Kikus and Other Stories by Elena Poniatowska


Elena Poniatowska - 1954
    Lilus Kikus, published in 1954, was her first book. However, it was labeled a children's book because it had a young girl as protagonist, it included illustrations, and the author was an unknown woman. Lilus Kikus has not received the critical attention or a translation into English it deserved, until now. Accompanying Lilus Kikus in this first American edition are four of Poniatowska's short stories with female protagonists, only one of which has been previously published in English.Poniatowska is admired today as a feminist, but in 1954, when Lilus Kikus appeared, feminism didn't have broad appeal. Twenty-first-century readers will be fascinated by the way Poniatowska uses her child protagonist to point out the flaws in adult society. Each of the drawings by the great surrealist Leonora Carrington that accompany the chapters in Lilus Kikus expresses a subjective, interiorized vision of the child character's contemplations on life.A tantalizingly complex feminist author, whose importance and originality have yet to be appreciated in this country.--Cynthia Steele, author of Politics, Gender, and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988

Home Before Dark


Charles Maclean - 2009
    Frustrated with the police inquiry, Ed sets out to discover who killed her, & why. His quest brings him ever closer to the charming, lethal psychopath Ward, & his website, Home Before Dark.

Concierto barroco


Alejo Carpentier - 1974
    This novella is a bizarre and compelling fantasy, a labyrinth-like journey laced with layers of allusions, insights and humor through the transculturation between the Old World and New

Rosetta


Barbara Ewing - 2007
    She thinks she is named after the Princess Rosetta of the fairytales, who married the King of the Peacocks and lived happily ever after. But when she finds that it is a mysterious small port town in Egypt that gave her her name, her interest in hieroglyphics is born. Years later, when Rose is an older, wiser and sadder woman, it is her love of language that saves her life. The French Revolution; the rise of the power of the English church; the battles for Egypt between the British and the French; the discovery of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone in that same small port town - and above all the machinations of a rich, amoral, social-climbing member of the new' aristocracy and the extraordinary characters that surround him - all whirlpool together to carry Rose into France and a shared moment with Napoleon Bonaparte, and into the dark, unknown world of North Africa in her search to understand the meaning of words, and to find a child of her own.

Rhyming Life and Death


Amos Oz - 2007
    Among them are Yakir Bar-Orian Zhitomirski, a self-styled literary guru; Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, a poet (whose work provides the novel’s title); and Rochele Reznik, a professional reader, with whom the Author has a brief but steamy sexual skirmish; to say nothing of Ricky the waitress, the real object of his desire. One life story builds on another—and the author finds himself unexpectedly involved with his creations.

My Name Was Judas


C.K. Stead - 2006
    Judas’s name became synonymous with betrayer, but is that how Judas saw it? In this witty and teasingly controversial novel, set against a richly painted backdrop of ancient Palestine forty years after the death of Jesus, Judas tells his version of events.