Nostalgia for Death & Hieroglyphs of Desire


Xavier Villaurrutia - 1953
    As 1990 Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz makes clear in his book-length study, Hieroglyphs of Desire (translated by Esther Allen), Villaurrutia is a major poet of desire whose beloved is the death we live each day. His poems define life between the nocturnal and diurnal and have taken on added poignancy as uncanny prophecies of individual lives in the age of the AIDS epidemic.

Before


Carmen Boullosa - 1989
    This powerful exploration of the path to womanhood and lost innocence won Mexico's two most prestigious literary prizes.

Los ríos profundos


José María Arguedas - 1958
    He saw the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grimness of social conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the Indians who are a part of it. Ernesto, the narrator of Deep Rivers, is a child with origins in two worlds. The son of a wandering country lawyer, he is brought up by Indian servants until he enters a Catholic boarding school at age 14. In this urban Spanish environment he is a misfit and a loner. The conflict of the Indian and the Spanish cultures is acted out within him as it was in the life of Arguedas. For the boy Ernesto, salvation is his world of dreams and memories. While Arguedas' poetry was published in Quechua, he invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary. This makes translation into other languages extremely difficult, and Frances Horning Barraclough has done a masterful job, winning the 1978 Translation Center Award from Columbia University for her efforts.

Lotería


Mario Alberto Zambrano - 2013
    Alone in her room, the young girl retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through a deck of Lotería cards-a Mexican version of bingo featuring bright, colorful images.Neither the social worker assigned to her case nor her Aunt Tencha, who desperately pleads for her niece's release, can cajole Luz to speak. The young girl's only confidant is her journal. Within its pages, Luz addresses an invisible higher power, sharing her secrets.Using the Lotería cards as her muse, Luz picks one card from the deck with each shuffle. Each of the cards' colorful images- mermaids, bottles, spiders, death, and stars-sparks a random memory. Pieced together, these snapshots bring into focus the joy and pain of the young girl's life, and the events that led to her present situation. But just as the story becomes clear, a breathtaking twist changes everything.A surprising, spellbinding tale richly imaginative and atmospheric, Lotería is an exquisite debut novel from an outstanding new voice in fiction.

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.

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."

The Club Dumas


Arturo Pérez-Reverte - 1993
    When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer's trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world

All Men Are Liars


Alberto Manguel - 2008
    Through the diverse voices of those close to Bevilacqua and their divergent portraits of the man at the center of this literary examination of truth, the reader holds the power of final judgment. In All Men Are Liars, Alberto Manguel pay homage to literature's shapeshifting inventions, in which our own ideas or the world and the people around us are given agency and projected onto these brilliant, virtuoso pages.

Ten Women


Marcela Serrano - 2004
    They all have one person in common, their beloved therapist Natasha who, though central to the lives of all of the women, is absent from their meeting. The women represent the many cultural and social groups that modern Chile is comprised of—from a housekeeper to celebrity television personality. They are of disparate ages and races and their lives have been touched by major political events from the dictatorship of Pinochet to the Israel-Palestine conflict. But despite their differences, as the women tell their stories, unlikely bonds are formed, and their lives are transformed in this intricately woven, beautifully rendered tale of the universal bonds between women from one of Latin America’s most celebrated novelists.

100 Love Sonnets


Pablo Neruda - 1959
    The subject of that love is Matilde Urrutia de Neruda, Pablo's 'beloved wife'.

Tierra del Fuego


Francisco Coloane - 1956
    These nine stories of adventure, exploration and voyage are peopled with ravenous explorers, fortune hunters, foreign revolutionaries, ill-fated seafarers, intrepid ship's captains, and ruthless smugglers.

The Mexico City Reader


Rubén Gallo - 2004
    This is not the City of Palaces of yesteryear, but the vibrant, chaotic, anarchic city of the 1980s and 1990s - the city of garbage mafias, corrupt ex-presidents, and spectacular crime. Taken together in all their variety, these texts form a mosiac of life in Mexico City. Like the visitor wandering through the city streets, the reader should expect to be constantly surprised. vibrant urban spaces in the world. Like the streets of the city, The Mexico City Reader is brimming with life, crowded with flaneurs, flirtatious students, Indian dancers, food vendors, fortune tellers, political activists, and peasant protesters. The writers include expert theorists - a panoply of writers from Carlos Monsivais and Jorge Ibaguengoitia to Fabrizio Mejia Madrid and Juieta Garcia Gonzalez - brought together precisely because they are experienced practitioners of the city.

Season of Ash


Jorge Volpi - 2006
    Told through the intertwined lives of three women- Irina, a Soviet biologist; Eva, a Hungarian computer scientist; and Jennifer, an American economist- this novel-of-ideas is part detective novel, part scientific investigation and part journalistic expose, with a dark, destructive love story at its center.

Death in Veracruz


Héctor Aguilar Camín - 1985
    This novel, translated for the first time in English since its publication 30 years ago, concerns a journalist who investigates the death of a colleague and friend Rojano in a bizarre shooting incident that takes place in a small rural village, and who finds himself up against crooked police and a charismatic and ruthless union boss . But, as he gets deeper into this Mexican Heart of Darkness, he finds Rojano was not all he seemed, and neither was his widow with whom he falls into a doomed affair.

Little Eyes


Samanta Schweblin - 2018
    They're following you. They're everywhere now. They're us.In Samanta Schweblin's wildly imaginative new novel, Little Eyes, "kentukis" have gone viral across the globe. They're little mechanical stuffed animals that have cameras for eyes, wheels for feet, and are connected to an anonymous global server. Owners of kentukis have the eyes of a stranger in their home and a cute squeaking pet following them; or you can be the kentuki and voyeuristically spend time in someone else's life, controlling the creature with a few keystrokes. Through kentukis, a jaded Croatian hustler stumbles into a massive criminal enterprise and saves a life in Brazil, a lonely old woman in Peru becomes fascinated with a young woman and her louche lover in Germany, and a motherless child in Antigua finds a new virtual family and experiences snow for the first time in Norway.These creatures can reveal the beauty of connection between farflung souls - but they also expose the ugly humanity of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to unexpected love and marvelous adventure, but what happens when the kentukis pave the way for unimaginable terror?