Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. One morning he walked out onto the battlements and climbed down to where the cliffs dropped sharply to the sea. From out of the fierce wind, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major opus—completely only after another ten, tormented years of effort—and one of the literary masterpieces of the century. Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator David Young, “to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.”

    Bilingual edition in Spanish and English. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Margaret Sayers Peden, who is well known and respected for her translations of Fuentes, Neruda, Quiroga, and Paz, has made an admirable selection of poems that includes romances, redondillas, epigrams, decimas, sonnets, silvas, villancicos, and two excerpts from Sor Juana's theater. The introduction and notes provide the necessary context for those unfamiliar with the poet's life and times. "Her sprightly English versions of these technically exacting poems...would, I am sure of it, have pleased Sor Juana herself"--Alastair Reid.

    Borges wanders from nostalgic reminiscence to literary criticism, and from philosophical speculation to political pronouncements. His thoughts on literature alone run the gamut from the Bible and Homer to Ernest Hemingway and Julio Cortázar. We learn that Dante is the writer who has impressed Borges most, that Borges considers Federico García Lorca to be a "second-rate poet," and that he feels Adolfo Bioy Casares is one of the most important authors of this century. Borges dwells lovingly on Buenos Aires, too.From the preface:For seven afternoons, the teller of tales preceded me, opening tall doors which revealed unsuspected spiral staircases, through the National Library's pleasant maze of corridors, in search of a secluded little room where we would not be interrupted by the telephone…The Borges who speaks to us in this book is a courteous, easy-going gentleman who verifies no quotations, who does not look back to correct mistakes, who pretends to have a poor memory; he is not the terse Jorge Luis Borges of the printed page, that Borges who calculates and measures each comma and each parenthesis.Sorrentino and translator Clark M. Zlotchew have included an appendix on the Latin American writers mentioned by Borges.Fernando Sorrentino is an Argentine writer born in Buenos Aires in 1942. His works have been translated into more than twelve languages.Clark M. Zlotchew is a professor of Spanish at SUNY Fredonia. Some of his areas of specialization: Jorge Luis Borges, 20th century Spanish-American Fiction, Literary Translation, and Literary Interview.

    Later published as a book, Una excursion a los indios ranqueles constitutes one of the few literary works that presents a vivid and testimonial account of a peaceful encounter between the native inhabitants of the South and those who consider themselves to be representatives of European civilization and of the Argentina of the future.Esteemed for its humor and narrative originality, Lucio V. Mansilla's Una excursion a los indios ranqueles is comparable to Sarmiento's Facundo and the two complement each other. Mansilla's book offers penetrating observations about the fundamental aspects of the confrontation between "civilization and barbarism," as well as about immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, private property ownership and land tenure. Juan Manuel de Rosas had dominated a large part of the country between 1829 and 1852 and despite having led successful expeditions against the indigenous frontier populations, the situation of the "Indian question" after his fall from power was a problematic one.In 1869, after a peace treaty was signed, Mansilla was sent to the tense frontier zone on a fact-finding mission. Colonel Mansilla, an experienced and cultured aristocrat, as well as a nephew of Rosas' (which he wrote "Rozas), was an exception in his era for his advocacy of an open dialogue as the best solution for the "Indian problem." Eventually the peaceful treaty he sought with the Ranqueles was rejected by the government, which gradually established policies of ethnic cleansing and land expropriation.Mansilla, with subtle humor, titled his expedition an "excursion," elegantly minimizing the dangers it entailed and avoiding any allusion to his disobedience to orders. During the trip Mansilla wrote a series of letters to a friend which were later published in La Tribuna of Buenos Aires. His detailed observations offer, besides a sharp-eyed and amusing commentary, quantities of ethnographic information, particularly valuable since shortly after that the majority of indigenous people in the south of Argentina were exterminated or assimilated.This book, as well as his participation in political and social events, established Lucio V. Mansilla as one of the dominating figures of the "Generation of 1880," which is so important in the literary and intellectual development of modern Argentina. This edition, by Saul Sosnowski, is an updated version of the text published by Biblioteca Ayacucho in 1984, to which he has added many very useful footnotes that aid in fuller comprehension of the text."

     In the days following the Pope’s death, a cardinal is found brutally murdered in a chapel in Rome, his eyes gouged and his hands cut off. Called in for the grisly case, police inspector Paola Dicanti learns that another cardinal was recently found dead; he had also been tortured. Desperate to find the killer before another victim dies, Paola’s investigation is soon joined by Father Anthony Fowler—an American priestand former Army intelligence officer examining sexual abuse in the Church, who knows far more about the killer than Paola could possibly imagine. As Paola and Father Anthony struggle through a maze of tantalizing clues, they begin to question whether someone in the Vatican is aiding their cause or abetting a murderer. And when evidence leads them to powerful figures within the Church hierarchy, their own pursuit of the truth may make them the next pawns to be sacrificed in a terrifying and deadly game. A dazzling, impossible-to-put-down thriller, Juan Gómez-Jurado’s God’s Spy marks the arrival of a major new talent to the contemporary suspense fiction scene.

    Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest, about the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital’s demise. It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends into the state-run purgatory of an overcrowded, understaffed Massachusetts mental hospital. Surrounded by inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies and raving behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses, and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a motley assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon, a wise ex-firefighter, and a man obsessed with battling imagined devils. But there’s nothing imaginary about the young nurse found sexually assaulted and brutally murdered late one night after lights-out.The police suspect an inmate, while patients whisper about visions of a white-shrouded “angel.” But the striking and mysterious prosecuting attorney who arrives to investigate has her own chilling theory—about the grim, telltale “signature” left on the victim’s body, a string of unsolved sex killings, and a very real devil who, by chance or design, has come to turn a madhouse into a slaughterhouse.Now, with the past creeping back to haunt his thoughts, and nothing but a pencil and the bare walls of his bleak apartment, Francis surrenders to the overwhelming need to tell the story of those nightmarish days. But because the crime was never solved, it’s a story doomed to remain unfinished. Until, like Francis’s long-buried recollections, the killer resurfaces . . . with a vengeance.A tour de force narrative journey through the eerily unpredictable mind of an utterly unusual hero, The Madman’s Tale will keep even the most astute thriller reader uncertain, unnerved, and unable to resist the tantalizing twists and turns of this fiendishly suspenseful shadow show.From the Hardcover edition.

    Alfonso, a young journalist, reveals, as in a brilliantly developed film script, the bloody events that occur in a desperate and violent city.

    This is the book that her many fans have been anxiously awaiting - the definitive, complete collection of poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, including 164 poems in all, as well as the full text of her Nobel acceptance speech of December 7, 1996, in Stockholm. Beautifully translated by Stanislaw Bara«nczak and Clare Cavanagh, who won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize for their work, this volume is a must-have for all readers of poetry.

    But then the children arrived.No one knew where they came from: thirty-two kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city’s own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse, municipal forces embark on a hunt to find the kids before the city falls into irreparable chaos.Narrated by the social worker who led the hunt, A Luminous Republic is a suspenseful, anguished fable that “could be read as Lord of the Flies seen from the other side, but that would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world” (Juan Gabriel Vásquez).

    Only the fourth book of Peri Rossi’s to be translated into English—the others are The Ship of Fools, A Forbidden Passion, and Dostoevsky’s Last Night—Solitaire of Love showcases the mesmerizingly rhythmic language that has become the trademark of this award-winning and prolific author of novels, essay collections, poetry, and short stories. Tracing the course of a relationship as it evolves into uncompromising self-destruction, the narrator of Solitaire of Love becomes addicted to his own passion and to the body of his beloved. Erotic, romantic love becomes bewitchment, producing a heightened state where time is measured in the rhythms of a chosen body and pride becomes subservient to obsession. The specifics of this other body trump any claim to ordinary existence for the narrator, as sex becomes a kind of idolatrous slavery and love becomes a mechanism for self-immolation. As in Peri Rossi’s other works, an ambiguous sense of gender and sexuality arise from her uniquely experimental prose and mystically erotic logic. Language is subsumed into this process as a way to bear witness, to transfix and capture the love object. The limbo of obsession, as described by Peri Rossi, creates an infantilizing brand of loneliness, broken by flashes of joy, insight, fury, and fear. This novel was originally published in Spanish in 1988.

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    She worked as a housekeeper, a caregiver, a cleaner—somehow always taking care of someone else. Two generations later, during the Women’s March in 2018, Alicia was working at the snack shop in the Atocha train station when it overflowed with protesters and strikers. Women, so many women, were flooding the streets with their signs and chants. She couldn’t have known María was among them; she was on the clock. And later, she’d be looking for someone else, a man to take her away for a few hours, to make her forget. Anyone but her husband, with his pleas to go on bike rides together, to have children, to act like the other thirtysomething couples they knew.  Medel’s lyrical sensibility reveals her roots as a poet, but her fast-paced and expansive storytelling show she’s a novelist ahead of her time. With grit, texture, and mesmerizing prose, The Wonders launches an inimitable new voice in fiction.

    Diego, the son, is disillusioned and bitter about the limited freedoms his country offers him. Mariana, the mother, is unwell and forced to relinquish her control over the home to her daughter, Maria, who has left school and is working as a chambermaid in one of the state-owned tourist hotels. The father, Armando, is a committed revolutionary who is sickened by the corruption he perceives all around him. In meticulously charting the disintegration of a family, The Fallen offers a poignant reflection on contemporary Cuba and the clash of the ardent idealism of the old guard with the jaded pragmatism of the young.