And survive she did, but not unscathed. This intimate narrative echoes the voice of the narrator's younger self, a sharp, sensitive girl keen to life's hardships.With bare language and smart humor, both delicate and unafraid, the narrator strings a strand of touching moments together to create a portrait of an unconventional childhood that crushed her, scarred her, mended her, tore her apart and ultimately made her whole.

    Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance and redemptive power.Bukowski is brilliant on love—often amusing, sometimes playful, and fleetingly sweet. On Love offers deep insight into Bukowski the man and the artist; whether writing about his daughter, his lover, his friends, or his work, he is piercingly honest and poignantly reflective, using love as a prism to see the world in all its beauty and cruelty, and his own fragile place in it. “My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough,” he writes, “as the same cat crouches.”Brutally honest, flecked with humor and pathos, On Love reveals Bukowski at his most candid and affecting.

    But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part crime romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.

    This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas’s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The “lecturer” tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will “kill” its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the part literature plays in our lives.

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

    Readers unfamiliar with the work of this Portuguese Nobel Prize winner would do well to begin with The Cave, a novel of ideas, shaded with suspense. Spare and pensive, The Cave follows the fortunes of an aging potter, Cipriano Algor, beginning with his weekly delivery of plates to the Center, a high-walled, windowless shopping complex, residential community, and nerve center that dominates the region. What sells at the Center will sell everywhere else, and what the Center rejects can barely be given away in the surrounding towns and villages. The news for Cipriano that morning isn't good. Half of his regular pottery shipment is rejected, and he is told that the consumers now prefer plastic tableware. Over the next week, he and his grown daughter Marta grieve for their lost craft, but they gradually open their eyes to the strange bounty of their new condition: a stray dog adopts them, and a lovely widow enters Cipriano's life. When they are invited to live at the Center, it seems ungracious to refuse, but there are some strange developments under the complex, and a troubling increase in security, and Cipriano changes all their fates by deciding to investigate. In Saramago's able hands, what might have become a dry social allegory is a delicately elaborated story of individualism and unexpected love. --Regina Marler

    In his parents' house, he finds a cache of documents-articles, maps, photographs-and unwittingly begins to unearth his father's obsession with the disappearance of a local man. Suddenly he comes face-to-face with the ghosts of Argentina's dark political past and with the long-hidden memories of his family's underground resistance against an oppressive military regime. As the fragments of the narrator's investigation fall into place-revealing not only a part of his father's life he had tried to forget but also the legacy of an entire generation- My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain tells a completely original story of family and remembrance. It is an audacious accomplishment by an internationally acclaimed voice poised to garner equal acclaim in America.

    In eleven chapters, "Kalpa Imperial"'s multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories. But this is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and translator Ursula K. Le Guin are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. "Kalpa Imperial" is a powerful introduction to the writing of Angelica Gorodischer, a novel which will enthrall readers already familiar with the worlds of Le Guin.Selected for the "New York Times" Summer Reading list.* "The dreamy, ancient voice is not unlike Le Guin's, and this collection should appeal to her fans as well as to those of literary fantasy and Latin American fiction."--"Library Journal" (Starred Review)"There's a very modern undercurrent to the Kalpa empire, with tales focusing on power (in a political sense) rather than generic moral lessons. Her mythology is consistent--wide in scope, yet not overwhelming. The myriad names of places and people can be confusing, almost Tolkeinesque in their linguistic originality. But the stories constantly move and keep the book from becoming overwhelming. Gorodischer has a sizeable body of work to be discovered, with eighteen books yet to reach English readers, and this is an impressive introduction."--"Review of Contemporary Fiction""Borges and Cortazar are alive and well."--"Bridge Magazine""Those looking for offbeat literary fantasy will welcome "Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, " by Argentinean writer Angelica Gorodischer. Translated from the Spanish by Ursula Le Guin, this is the first appearance in English of this prize-winning South American fantasist."--"Publishers Weekly""It's always difficult to wrap up a rave review without babbling redundant praises. This time I'll simply say "Buy this Book!""--"Locus""The elaborate history of an imaginary country...is Nabokovian in its accretion of strange and rich detail, making the story seem at once scientific and dreamlike."--"Time Out New York""Kalpa Imperial" has been awarded the Prize "Mas Alla" (1984), the Prize "Sigfrido Radaelli" (1985) and also the Prize Poblet (1986). It has had four editions in Spanish: Minotauro (Buenos Aires), Alcor (Barcelona), Gigamesh (Barcelona), and Planeta Emece Editions (Buenos Aires).Praise for the Spanish-language editions of "Kalpa Imperial" "Angelica Gorodischer, both from without and within the novel, accomplishes the indispensable function Salman Rushdie says the storyteller must have: not to let the old tales die out; to constantly renew them. And she well knows, as does that one who met the Great Empress, that storytellers are nothing more and nothing less than free men and women. And even though their freedom might be dangerous, they have to get the total attention of their listeners and, therefore, put the proper value on the art of storytelling, an art that usually gets in the way of those who foster a forceful oblivion and prevent the winds of change."--Carmen Perilli, "La Gaceta," Tucuman"At a time when books are conceived and published to be read quickly, with divided attention in the din of the subway or the car, this novel is to be tasted with relish, in peace, in moderation, chewing slowly each and every one of the stories that make it up, and digesting it equally slowly so as to properly assimilate it all."--Rodolfo Martinez"A vast, cyclical filigree . . . Gorodischer reaches much farther than the common run of stories about huge empires, maybe because she wasn't interested in them to begin with, and enters the realm of fable, legend, and allegory."--Luis G. Prado, "Gigamesh," Barcelona

    It won’t be the last. He’s now arrived in Galicia. It’s where Álvaro died. It’s where the case has already been quickly closed as a tragic accident. It’s also where Álvaro hid his secrets.The man to whom Manuel was married for fifteen years was not the unassuming man he knew.Álvaro’s trail leads Manuel deep into one of Spain’s most powerful and guarded families. Behind the walls of their forbidding estate, Manuel is nothing but an unwelcome and dangerous intruder. Then he finds two allies: a stubbornly suspicious police lieutenant and Álvaro’s old friend—and private confessor—from seminary school. Together they’re collecting the pieces of Álvaro’s past, his double life, and his mysterious death.But in the shadows of nobility and privilege, Manuel is about to unravel a web of corruption and deception that could be as fatal a trap for him as it was for the man he loved.

    Set in Mexico City, The Night Buffalo revolves around the mysterious suicide of Gregorio, a charismatic but troubled young man who was betrayed by the two people he trusted most.

    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.

    In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

    It was filled with hundreds of niches, one over the other. There is a country in each one; they're like boys, they're dead." In this landmark poem, written at the height of the Pinochet dictatorship, major Chilean poet Raul Zurita protests with ferocious invention the extinguishment of a generation and the brutalization of a nation. Of the role of poetry and of his own treatment by the military under this regime, Zurita has said, "You see, the only thing that told me that I wasn't crazy, that I wasn't living in a nightmare, was this file of poems, and then when they threw them into the sea, then I understood exactly what was happening." This elegy refuses to be an elegy, refuses to let the Disappeared disappear.

    The debut work in English by Mexico's greatest and most influential living author and winner of the Cervantes Prize ("the Spanish language Nobel"), The Art of Flight takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the world's cultural capitals as Sergio Pitol looks back on his well-traveled life as a legendary author, translator, scholar, and diplomat.The first work in Pitol's "Trilogy of Memory," The Art of Flight imaginatively blends the genres of fiction and memoir in a Borgesian swirl of contemplation and mystery, expanding our understanding and appreciation of what literature can be and what it can do.

    Even princes from faraway planets do not always remain small. Eventually they grow up and – no longer content with their tiny planet – set off once again to explore the universe anew. So the Little Prince, now a teenager, one day returns to Earth and finds himself on a lonely country road in the vast, desolate plains of Patagonia. There he meets the narrator of this novel, who rescues him and takes him on a journey. Slowly the Prince shares the stories of his adventures, and together they begin to explore some of life’s most important questions, taking readers along with them on a wonderful spiritual journey. An inspiring, life-changing book.