Book picks similar to
Méjico by Antonio Ortuño


spanish-fiction
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The Inhabited Woman


Gioconda Belli - 1988
    She is sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being, then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and—through the power of love—finds the courage to act.

A Pillar of Iron


Taylor Caldwell - 1965
    The hero of the story, the man called "a pillar of iron" is Marcus Tullius Cicero, the lawyer-statesman who tried vainly to save the republic he loved from the forces of tyranny. Unfolding here are the private dramas behind the great Roman hero's triumphs and defeats - and the intimate, deeply moving story of his desperate love affair with the beautiful Livia.

The Popol Vuh


Anonymous
    Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, "the book of the woven mat," one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose--and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett--this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as "the phonetic rendering of a living pulse."

Open Door


Iosi Havilio - 2009
    . . . With skill and subtlety, the novel hints that a whole society might labor under an illusion of liberty."—The EconomistWhen her partner disappears, a young woman drifts towards Open Door, a small town in the Argentinean Pampas named after its psychiatric hospital. She finds herself living with an aging ranch-hand, although a local girl also proves irresistible . . .Iosi Havilio bursts onto the Argentine literary scene after Open Door was highly praised by some of the country's most influential critics and writer, including Beatriz Sarlo and Rodolfo Fogwill.

Death Rites


Alicia Giménez Bartlett - 1996
    Inspector Petra Delicado has been chained to a tiresome desk job in the documentation department of the Barcelona police force for months. But things are about to change. The department is short-handed and there's a serial rapist on the loose. Delicado is partnered with the portly and impossibly compliant Sergeant Fermin Garzon with orders to solve the case before it succeeds in ruining the good name of the Barcelona police force. However, the only lead they have is the rapist's mysterious signature; a circular mark of unknown origins he leaves on his victims' forearms. No witnesses, no other leads, and no help from the victims themselves. To further complicate her life, Inspector Delicado is trying to shake off two ex-husbands, Hugo, who persists in shamelessly belittling her, and Pepe, as helpless and hapless as a little boy in her absence. (from the cover blurb)Tough, sexy, at times apparently pitiless, Petra Delicado is a new kind of cop in Spanish crime writing. As she does battle with sexist colleagues, ruthless reporters, indifferent witnesses, hardened criminals, ex-husbands, and houseplants that just won't flower, she sometimes thinks her thirst for new challenges and perpetual change is more trouble than its worth.

Desolation


Yasmina Reza - 1999
    He has had a full life, and now, in his later years, retired, his second wife getting on his nerves, love affairs a distant memory, he has a few things that he'd like to get off his chest. As he talks—half to himself, half to the son he can't understand—we're introduced to Nancy, his too-happy wife; to their housekeeper, Mrs. Dacimiento, who still can't put the bag properly over the rim of the garbage can; to his chum Lionel; to his daughter and her wannabe-truly-Jewish husband; and to the heartbreaking Marisa Botton, his idiotic, irresistible mistress. Finally, we witness his chance re-encounter with the charming Genevieve Abramowitz, who in telling him a story of her own leads him to his final overtures. Yasmina Reza has written a symphonic monologue—a passionate kvetch, a truly original work.Author Biography: Yasmina Reza is a playwright and novelist whose plays have all been multi-award-winning critical and popular international successes, translated into more than thirty languages. Her plays include Conversations After a Burial, The Passage of Winter, Art, which was awarded a Tony in 1999, The Unexpected Man, and Life 33. She is also the author of a translation of The Metamorphosis; a novel, Hammerklavier; and a film, Lulu Kreutz'sPicnic. She lives in Paris.

Mutant


Lewis Padgett - 1953
    This minority, once the children became able to communicate their ability, became a feared and quarantined group; "ordinary" humans felt that their privacy had been taken from them and that the mutants, the "Baldies" (so called because of their most distinguishing visible characteristic) by knowing their most secrets could destroy them.Most of the Baldies submit to the quarantine. They seek peaceful accommodation with the "Normals". A small minority of this minority, however, known as the "Paranoids" sought the destruction of humanity, felt that no co-existence with the majority would ever be possible because their fear and hatred could only lead to a pogrom. In four novelettes published in 1943 - The Piper's Son, Beggars in Velvet, The Lion and the Unicorn and Three Blind Mice - Kuttner explored the struggle within and without the community of Baldies, the menace presented to peaceable telepaths by their faction of Paranoids and by non-telepathic humans who feared them. Some accommodation seems possible at times, at others it seems chimerical because of the influence of the Paranoids within the community and the hatred for the normals which the Paranoids express. As circumstances move inexorably toward what will be a murderous and devastating confrontation between the two species of humanity, the final novelette, Humpty Dumpty, depicts a possible solutions found by the Baldies. It is a solution shrouded with risk and suspicion which, although offered to humanity may never be accepted, so deeply advanced are strife and suspicion."The pogrom might go on until the last Baldie died. But until then,no Baldy would live or die alone. So they waited, together, for the answer man must give."

The Dancer and the Thief


Antonio Skármeta - 2003
    Ángel Santiago, a youth determined to avenge abuse he received in jail, seeks out the notorious bank robber Nicolás Vergara Grey, whose front-page exploits won him a reputation he would rather leave behind. Their plan for an ambitious and daring robbery is complicated by the galvanizing presence of Victoria Ponce, a virtuosic dancer and high-school dropout whose father was a victim of the regime. Praised for his “ability to place a personal story in the context of a national upheaval and make it warm, funny and universal” (San Francisco Chronicle), Antonio Skármeta sets this exuberant love story against the backdrop of the new Chile, free from the Pinochet dictatorship but beholden to the perils of globalization. The Dancer and the Thief, which won Spain’s prestigious Planeta Prize, is a remarkable new novel from one of South America’s finest storytellers.

The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico


Miguel León-Portilla - 1959
    Miguel León-Portilla had the incomparable success of organizing texts translated from Nahuatl by Ángel María Garibay Kintana to give us the The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico: Indigenous people of Tenochtitlán, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Chalco and Tlaxcala were formed about the struggle against the conquerors and the final ruin of the Aztec world.An account of the omens that announced the disaster, a description of Cortes' progress, a chronicle of the heroic battle of the ancient Mexicans in defense of their culture and of their own lives, a civilization that was lost forever, a great epic poem of the origins of Mexican nationality, The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico is already a classic book and an indispensable reading work.

Cuentos españoles


Ángel Flores - 1960
    Complete faithful English translations on facing pages. Includes Spanish to English vocabulary, biographical-critical introductions, more.

Fluid Mechanics with Engineering Applications


E. John Finnemore - 1985
    This book is for civil engineers that teach fluid mechanics both within their discipline and as a service course to mechanical engineering students. As with all previous editions this 10th edition is extraordinarily accurate, and its coverage of open channel flow and transport is superior. There is a broader coverage of all topics in this edition of Fluid Mechanics with Engineering Applications. Furthermore, this edition has numerous computer-related problems that can be solved in Matlab and Mathcad.

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro


Antonio Tabucchi - 1997
    Tabucchi has now written a thriller, but one with a subtle intellectual depth not usual in that genre. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro intriguingly reflects on current social issues: crime, police corruption, yellow journalism, and the courts -- both of the law and of public opinion. Tabucchi hooks the reader on page one of this book and the story advances with electric and unflagging suspense. A gypsy discovers a headless body; Firmino, a young journalist who writes for a scandal-sheet, takes up the case; the headless corpse turns out to be that of one Damasceno Monteiro, an employee at an import-export company who, having stumbled upon a heroin smuggling ring at his work, had stolen a drug shipment; and, the police are supressing evidence -- all the stuff of familiar daily news, here made riveting in the hands of a rare and brilliant writer.

La Casa Grande


Álvaro Cepeda Samudio - 1962
    --Choice

Mafalda 3


Quino - 1965
    The strip features a girl named Mafalda (5 years old at the time of the comic's creation) who is deeply concerned about humanity and world peace and rebels against the world as it is. The brilliance of Mafalda lies foremost in the quirkiness of this little girl. She hates (that is an understatement) soup, cares deeply about humanity, loves the Beatles and has a bunch of equally quirky friends. More than twenty years later, Mafalda is still immensely popular throughout Latin America and it has be translated into over 30 languages.

Fausto


Estanislao del Campo - 1866
    It is known that during the representation of Gounod's opera Faust at the old Colon theatre in Buenos Aires, Del Campo improvised for the benefit of Ricardo Gutiérrez -phisician, poet and friend- some short "gaucho" remarks about what they were seeing. Encouraged by the amused Gutierrez, Del Campo decided to put his "gauchipoéticas" remarks by written, and in little more than a month the book became a huge literary success. Its hilarity lies in the fact that the gaucho is a peasant, and through his point of view the actions take the graphic simplicity of the camp world, blithely distorting the medieval drama. Reading Fausto today is as much fun as it was a hundred and forty years ago, reason enough to do it without the need of considering that it also integrates, along Hilario Ascasubi's Santos Vega and José Hernández Martín Fierro, the gauchesca poetry ultimate trio. The lexicographic notes included in this edition are the result of a research work based on the following sources: Eleuterio F. Tiscornia "Edición crítica de Poetas Gauchescos", Ed. Losada, Bs. As, 1940; Emilio Solanet "Pelajes Criollos", Ed. Kraft, Bs. As. 1955; Tito Saubidet "Vocabulario y refranero criollo", Ed. Kraft, Bs. As. 1943; Juan Carlos Guarnieri "El habla del boliche", Editorial Florencia & Lafon, Montevideo 1967; Juan Carlos Guarnieri "Diccionario del leguaje campesino rioplatense", Editorial Florencia & Lafon, Montevideo 1968; Daniel Granada, "Vocabulario rioplatense razonado", Imprenta Rural, Montevideo 1890; y Ramón R. Capdevila "1700 refranes, dichos y modismos (región central bonaerense)", Ed. Patria, Bs. As. 1955.