It gives its name to this fictional biography of Lopez Rega, Isabel Peron's minister of social well-being who ruled Argentina through sorcery and witchcraft. A figure of immense power and cruelty, Lopez Rega survives all attempts by politicians and the military to overthrow him. So great is the magic of this power-crazed witch-doctor that the writer / narrator can destroy him only by removing herself: 'By erasing myself from the map, I intend to erase you. Without my biography, it will be as if you never had a life. So long, Sorcerer, felice morte.' In The Lizard's Tail, Luisa Valenzuela re-invents language to convey the political reality of Latin America. A reality in which the writer hangs in the balance.

    Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an invisible wall around their property.

    He likes to stretch things out over precisely seven coffees. No one knows whether he actu-ally travels to the stars, but he tells the best tall tales in the city, so why doubt him? By the light of the chaste electronic moon --The sense of the circle --Of navigators --The best day of the year --The González family's fight for a better world ----Interval with my aunts. Trafalgar and Josefina. --End of the interval --Mr. Chaos --Constancia --Strelitzias, Lagerstroemias, and Gypsophila --Trafalgar and I

    In this searing critique of Enlightenment values, fantastic themes are juxtaposed with brutal depictions of misogyny and violence, and frantically build to a fiery conclusion.Finally available to an English-speaking audience, Armonía Somers will resonate with readers of Clarice Lispector, Djuna Barnes, and Leonora Carrington.

    Enchanted by her father’s trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies against the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M’s memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts. M, in her innocence, barely notices the rising tensions and precarious nature of their work until she and her father connect with an enigmatic photographer, E, whose presence threatens to upend the unusual life they’ve created.María José Ferrada expertly captures a vanishing way of life and a father-daughter relationship on the brink of irreversible change. At once nostalgic, dangerous, sharply funny, and full of delight and wonder, How to Order the Universe is a richly imaginative debut and a rare work of magic and originality.

    When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the cost of an uncharted French island. A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, "The Conversions" invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.

    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.

    After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now. Afraid that her life will be over before anyone knows that she lived, Mathea digs out her old wedding dress, bakes some sweet cakes, and heads out into the world—to make her mark. She buries a time capsule out in the yard. (It gets dug up to make room for a flagpole.) She wears her late husband’s watch and hopes people will ask her for the time. (They never do.) Is it really possible for a woman to disappear so completely that the world won’t notice her passing? The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a macabre twist on the notion that life “must be lived to the fullest.”

    To compensate for the physical void which temporarily stalls their caresses, Brausen eavesdrops on the conversation of his neighbors, a husband and wife, imagining their gestures and their expressions. But he not only wishes to imagine himself as someone else, he also seeks release from the world he knows. He leads many lives, some real and some fantastic, in order to experience a moment of psychic weightlessness.

    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.

    Everything changes when he meets his wife Rosa thanks to the help of the Happy Heart Marriage Agency. They seem to have an understanding: Jose isn't bothered by Rosa's dishonesty, extra weight, and fantastically promiscuous past; Rosa isn't too put off by Jose's clubbed foot, periodic blackouts, or lack of direction--she just wants a house. Pragmatic, Jose sets out to get the money necessary to make that possible. And in doing so, he manages to become a robber, sniper, and political subversive wanted by the government. Deploying fast-paced, short chapters in a number of styles, Brandao deftly presents an array of engaging characters and conflicts, vividly depicting the absurdity of a repressive political regime with exceptional daring and humor.

     Sudden Death begins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the world. And in a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that instead of a parody, it’s a manual.   In this mind-bending, prismatic novel, worlds collide, time coils, traditions break down. There are assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, utopias, carnal liaisons and papal dramas, artistic and religious revolutions, love stories and war stories. A dazzlingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Álvaro Enrigue tells a grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era in this short, powerful punch of a novel. Game, set, match.

    Malinalli's Indian tribe has been conquered by the warrior Aztecs. When her father is killed in battle, she is raised by her wisewoman grandmother who imparts to her the knowledge that their founding forefather god, Quetzalcoatl, had abandoned them after being made drunk by a trickster god and committing incest with his sister. But he was determined to return with the rising sun and save her tribe from their present captivity. When Malinalli meets Cortez she, like many, suspects that he is the returning Quetzalcoatl, and assumes her task is to welcome him and help him destroy the Aztec empire and free her people. The two fall passionately in love, but Malinalli gradually comes to realize that Cortez's thirst for conquest is all too human, and that for gold and power, he is willing to destroy anyone, even his own men, even their own love.

    The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her.In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault's workshop; Gustave Courbet's devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau’s honor. . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator's life in Buenos Aires—her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies.Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.

    It tells of the life and opinions of Reger, a 'musical philosopher', through the voice of his acquaintance Atzbacher, a 'private academic'.The book is set in Vienna on one day around the year of its publication, 1985. Reger is an 82-year-old music critic who writes pieces for The Times. For over thirty years he has sat on the same bench in front of Tintoretto's White-bearded Man in the Bordone Room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum for four or five hours of the morning of every second day. He finds this environment the one in which he can do his best thinking. He is aided in this habit by the gallery attendant Irrsigler, who prevents other visitors from using the bench when Reger requires it.