In sixteenth-centruy Venice, celebrated physician Mateo Colombo finds himself behind bars at the behest of the Church authorities. His is a crime of disclosure, heinous and heretical in the Church's eyes, in that his research threatens to subvert the whole secular order of Renaissance society. Like his namesake Christopher Colombus, he has made a discovery of enormous significance for humankind. Whereas Colombus voyaged outward to explore the world and found the Americas, Mateo Colombo looked inward, across the mons veneris, and uncovered the clitoris. Based on historical fact, The Anatomist is an utterly fascinating excursion into Renaissance Italy, as evocative of time and place as the work of Umberto Eco, and reminiscent of the earthy sensuality of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perceptive and stirring, it ironically exposes not only the social hypocracies of the day, but also the prejudices and sexual taboos that may still be with us four hundred years later.

    Honest, blunt, compassionate, shrewd, and engaging, his voice provides an extraordinary insight into the African culture that took root in the Caribbean.

    Ivan Schulman introduces the text to place it in historical and cultural context. The Autobiography of a Slave makes available a major literary text and important social document, one that will contribute to the growing interest in Latin American slave societies and African Diaspora history and culture.

    Very quickly the Castro government suppressed his writing and persecuted him for his homosexuality until he was finally imprisoned.

    in Chalate, a small rural town: Lupe, the grandmother of the Guardado family and the central figure of the novel, is up and about doing her chores. By 5:00 P.M. the plot of the novel has been resolved, with the Civil Guard's search for and interrogation of Lupe's young granddaughter, Adolfina. Told entirely from the perspective of the resilient women of the Guardado family, One Day of Life is not only a disturbing and inspiring evocation of the harsh realities of peasant life in El Salvador after fifty years of military exploitation; it is also a mercilessly accurate dramatization of the relationship of the peasants to both the state and the church.Translated from the Spanish by Bill Brow

    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."

    Don Quixote, errant knight and sane madman, with the company of his faithful squire and wise fool, Sancho Panza, together roam the world and haunt readers' imaginations as they have for nearly four hundred years.

    In the brutality of his honesty, Mr. Gutierrez reminds one of Jean Genet and Charles Bukowski.” —New York TimesDirty Havana Trilogy chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former journalist now living hand to mouth in and around Cuba, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Collecting garbage, peddling marijuana or black-market produce, clearing undesirables off the streets, whoring himself, begging, sacrificing to the santos, Pedro Juan scrapes by under the shadow of hunger—all the while surviving through the escapist pursuit of sex. Pedro Juan’s unsentimental, mocking, yet sympathetic eye captures a shocking underbelly of today’s Cuba.Banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish speaking world, Gutierrez’s picaresque novel is a fierce, loving tribute to Havana and the defiant, desperate way of life that flourishes amid its decay.

    The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate—on identity and what it is that defines us—from which he cannot break free.Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie. Though she is engaged to be married, Sophie and Hans begin a relationship that defies contemporary mores about female sexuality and what can and cannot be said about it.Traveler of the Century is a deeply intellectual novel, chock-full of discussions about philosophy, history, literature, love, and translation. It is a book that looks to the past in order to have us reconsider the conflicts of our present. The winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Traveler of the Century marks the English-language debut of Andrés Neuman, a writer described by Roberto Bolaño as being “touched by grace.”

    With her first taste of dirt, she learns the horrifying truth of her mother’s death. Disturbed by what she witnesses, the woman keeps her visions to herself. But when Earth-eater begins an unlikely relationship with a withdrawn police officer, word of her ability begins to spread, and soon desperate members of her community beg for her help, anxious to uncover the truth about their own loved ones.Surreal and haunting, spare yet complex, Earth-eater is a dark, emotionally resonant tale told from a feminist perspective that brilliantly explores the stories of those left behind—the women enduring the pain of uncertainty, whose lives have been shaped by violence and loss.

    It is a world where everything impossible effortlessly becomes possible and everything real, unreal. In the hands of Lewis Carroll the heights of adventure are limited only by the reach of imagination. In the words of a contemporary of Carroll's, "if there be such a thing as perfection in children's tales

    It is the family story of Celia del Pino, and her husband, daughter and grandchildren, from the mid-1930s to 1980. Celia's story mirrors the magical realism of Cuba itself, a country of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. DREAMING IN CUBAN presents a unique vision and a haunting lamentation for a past that might have been.

    This is the story of two sisters and their close relationship despite the distance between them. One of them encounters a great love in her life that leads her to experience many things.

    His writing is at once comic and tragic as it explores the loneliness of life and disintegration of civilization.

    This edition also includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by author and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.