Book picks similar to
Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Güiraldes
argentina
fiction
spanish
latin-america
Broad and Alien is the World
Ciro Alegría - 1941
A rich, unrivalled picture of the lives of Peru's Indian population.
Space Invaders
Nona Fernández - 2013
In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella’s braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella’s father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of her after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friends―from her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Zúñiga―were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but were powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the “ghostly green bullets” they fired in the video game they played obsessively.One of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, Nona Fernández effortlessly builds a choral and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.
Ordesa
Manuel Vilas - 2018
In the face of enormous personal tumult, he sits down to write. What follows is an audacious chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his life's trials, failures, and triumphs that becomes a moving look at what family gives and takes away.With the intimacy of a diarist, he reckons with the ghosts of his parents and the current specters of his divorce, his children, his career, and his addictions. In unswervingly honest prose, Vilas explores his identity after great loss--what is a person without a marriage or without parents? What is a person when faced with memories alone? Already an acclaimed poet and novelist in Spain, Vilas takes his work to a whole new level with this autobiographical novel; critics have called it "a work of art able to cauterize pain."Elegiac and searching, Ordesa is a meditation on loss and a powerful exploration of a person who is both extraordinary and utterly ordinary--at once singular and representing us all--who transforms a time of crisis into something beautiful and redemptive.
Before
Carmen Boullosa - 1989
This powerful exploration of the path to womanhood and lost innocence won Mexico's two most prestigious literary prizes.
Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems
Roberto Juarroz - 1974
Winner of the Colorado Book Award for Translation upon its release, this book brings to English-speaking audiences new work by this brilliant Argentine poet of whom Octavio Paz says, "Each of Juarroz's poems is a surprising verbal crystallization: language reduced to a drop of light." In Juarroz's work we encounter the vertical depths of language, the inner wells.
The Woman Destroyed
Simone de Beauvoir - 1967
Three long stories that draw the reader into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises.
Vera
Elizabeth von Arnim - 1921
Both have recently lost someone close to them as the first chapter opens. They meet and at once believe they have found a soul mate in each other. As their relationship progresses we come to understand more of each character's past. Most importantly we learn about Wemyss' late wife, Vera. What at first appears to be a different and quirky romance turns out to be an indictment of egoism and dominance in relationships.
The Gray Notebook
Josep Pla - 1965
In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family, local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn’t; and the long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same unflagging zest and humor.Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works. It is a beautiful, entrancing, delightful book—at once a distillation of the spirit of youth and the work of a lifetime.
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.
La muerte me da
Cristina Rivera Garza - 2007
The body lies at the end of a back alley, next to a piece of paper with enigmatic verses of the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik. The woman who called herself Cristina Rivera Garza- notifies the finding to the police, and automatically turn herself into the mysterious informant. What did she see? What does she believe these verses mean, that start with Be Careful with me my love.
Beneath the Wheel
Hermann Hesse - 1906
When he is discovered to be an exceptionally gifted student, the entire community presses him onto a path of serious scholarship. Hans dutifully follows the regimen of tireless study and endless examinations, his success rewarded only with more crushing assignments. When Hans befriends a rebellious young poet, he begins to imagine other possibilities outside the narrowly circumscribed world of the academy. Finally sent home after a nervous breakdown, Hans is revived by nature and romance, and vows never to return to the gray conformity of the academic system.
New Islands: And Other Stories
María Luisa Bombal - 1939
that we greet the publication of New Islands, a slim book of evocative, haunting stories by Maria Luisa Bombal, a Chilean writer whose creative period was basically confined to the 1930's and 40's and whose work, although small in volume, was rich in its effects, anticipating the magic realism found in so much of today's Latin American fiction. - The New York Times
The Carpenter's Pencil
Manuel Rivas - 1998
In a prison in the pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela, an artist sketches the famous porch of the cathedral, the Portico da Gloria. He uses a carpenter's pencil. But instead of reproducing the sculptured faces of the prophets and elders, he draws the faces of his fellow Republican prisoners.Many years later in post-Franco Spain, a survivor of that period, Doctor Daniel da Barca, returns from exile to his native Galicia, and the threads of past memories begin to be woven together. This poetic and moving novel conveys the horror and savagery of the tragedy that divided Spain, and the experiences of the men and women who lived through it. Yet in the process, it also relates one of the most beautiful love stories imaginable.
The Speed of Light
Javier Cercas - 2005
It will be years before he understands that his burgeoning friendship with the Vietnam vet Rodney Falk, a strange and solitary man, will reshape his life, or that he will become obsessed with Rodney's mysterious past.Why does Rodney shun the world? Why does he accept and befriend the narrator? And what really happened at the mysterious ‘My Khe' incident? Many years pass with these questions unanswered; the two friends drift apart. But as the narrator's literary career takes off, his personal life collapses. Suddenly, impossibly, the novelist finds that Rodney's fate and his own are linked, and the story spirals towards its fascinating, surreal conclusion. Twisting together his own regrets with those of America, Cercas weaves the profound and personal story of a ghostly past.