A force of nature. To know her is to love her, to love her is to hate her. Shes a woman who changes her name according to the ethnic flavor of the month, dabbles in Mormonism, and steals cleaning supplies from restaurant bathrooms. She is beautiful, excitable, contradiction as art form. Shes the kind of mom who reads her daughters diary, serves ketchup soup for dinner, and drags her girls from Utah to California to Wyoming in pursuit of one loser boyfriend after another. Her love for her daughters is fierce, smothering, neglectful. There is no other way than her. Does that sound extravagant? Or should I say there is no other place than her, observes Lucy, the endearing narrator of Nicole Stansburys very special debut novel, Places to Look for a Mother. In the tradition of Mona Simpsons Anywhere But Here and Larry McMurtrys Terms of Endearment, Places to Look for a Mother tells a tale of mostly maddening mother-daughter bonds. Forgiveness is always there, but its hard to find. And the Taylor family usually loses it. With lithe prose, pitch-perfect dialogue, and gloriously real characters, author Nicole Stansbury conjures a family that proves Tolstoy right once again: All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The Taylors are no exception, but Places to Look for a Mother is an exceptionally good novel.

    Sixteen year old Teresita, illegitimate but beloved daughter of the wealthy and powerful rancher Don Tomas Urrea, wakes from the strangest dream - a dream that she has died. Only it was not a dream. This passionate and rebellious young woman has arisen from the dead with the power to heal - but it will take all her faith to endure the trials that await her and her family now that she has become the Saint of Cabora.The Hummingbird's Daughter is a vast, hugely satisfying novel of love and loss, joy and pain. Two decades in the writing, this is the masterpiece that Luis Alberto Urrea has been building up to.

    Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to this protective bubble, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation.When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. But Petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls' families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal. Inspired by the author's own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different, but inextricable coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.

    Intended as a starting point for a better understanding and appreciation of literature, each analysis also imparts information about the author, the social and historical background, structure and traditions of literary genres, facts about characters, and a bibliography to encourage further intellectual exploration. Esta colección es una herramienta indispensable para el estudio y análisis de obras clásicas de la literatura universal. Los libros de formato agradable y presentación moderna ofrecen un análisis crítico, información sobre los personajes y los géneros literarios, una bibliografía, y un compendio de la obra en particular junto a un estudio del autor y su época.

    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.

    But they are all survivors.This compelling novel follows the ripples that go out into ordinary lives, women's lives in particular, which have been scarred and changed by a shared experience, all connected by the same hospital clinic in a small Northern town. This is a novel about what it means to live in the shadow of disease and with its scars, whether mental and physical, looking back over one's shoulder while trying to go forward. You can trip up or, if you're careful, you might make it . . .

    Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Peron's government), it is Cortazar's allegorical, bitter, and melancholy farewell to an Argentina from which he was about to be permanently self-exiled. (Cortazar moved to Paris the following year.) The setting of Final Exam is a surreal Buenos Aires, dark and eerie, where a strange fog has enveloped the city to everyone's bewilderment. Juan and Clara, two students, meet up with their friends Andres and Stella, as well as a journalist friend they call "the chronicler." Juan and Clara are getting ready to take their final exams, but instead of preparing, they wander the city with their friends, encounter strange happenings in the squares and ponder life in cafes. All the while, they are trailed by the mysterious Abel.With its daring typography, its shifts in rhythm as well as in the wildly veering directions of its characters' thoughts and speech, Final Exam breaks new ground in the territory of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques. It is considered one of Cortazar's best works.

    Claire Limyè Lanmè - Claire of the Sea Light - is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy in Ville Rose, Haiti. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on each of her birthdays Claire is taken by her father, Nozias, to visit her mother's grave. Nozias wonders if he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of her own, so that Claire can have a better life. But on the night of Claire's seventh birthday, when at last he makes the wrenching decision to do so, she disappears. As Nozias and others look for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed among the community of men and women whose individual stories connect to Claire, to her parents, and to the town itself. Told with piercing lyricism and the economy of a fable, Claire of the Sea Light is a tightly woven, breathtaking tapestry that explores what it means to be a parent, child, neighbor, lover, and friend, while revealing the mysterious bonds we share with the natural world and with one another. Embracing the magic and heartbreak of ordinary life, it is Edwidge Danticat's most spellbinding, astonishing book yet.

    (Nancy Pearl)

    Here live the Starkadders - Aunt Ada Doom, Judith, Amos, Seth, Reuben, Elfine...They lead messy, untidy lives, full of dark thoughts, moody silences, and sudden noisy quarrels. That is, until their attractive young cousin arrives from London. Neat, sensible, efficient, Flora Poste cannot bear messes (they are so uncivilized). She begins to tidy up the Starkadders' lives at once ...

    When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny.

    The characters on the 'Ship of Fools' - a ship that's going nowhere very fast - bicker and struggle for attention: telling tales that bounce off one another to form a compendium of interrelated stories.

    Their neighbour Elizabeth, a woman in her seventies, falls from an upstairs window and her granddaughter Jody is summoned to nurse her through her convalescence.The scene is set for a magical story of love and loneliness, of terror and human frailty, of the mystery and grace of ordinary experience. Alice Hoffman's ability to fuse the domestic and the mythic in a narrative of such gentle yet magnetic force confirms her stature as one of the most gifted of American novelists.

    Iceland is a world darkened by superstition, poverty and cruelty. Men of science marvel over a unicorn’s horn, poor folk worship the Virgin in secret and both books and men are burnt. Jónas Pálmason, a poet and self-taught healer, has been condemned to exile for heretical conduct, having fallen foul of the local magistrate. Banished to a barren island, Jónas recalls his exorcism of a walking corpse on the remote Snjafjoll coast, the frenzied massacre of innocent Basque whalers at the hands of local villagers, and the deaths of three of his children.From the Mouth of the Whale is a magical evocation of an enlightened mind and a vanished age.

    The problem is that Gauna can only dimly remember what happened: he was out on the town with his raucous, reckless friends when a masked woman appeared. Several hours later, gasping and horrified, Gauna awoke at the edge of a lake. Three years later, he tries to solve the mystery the only way he knows: by re-creating the same situation and reliving it- despite the warnings of his secret protector, the Sorcerer.In The Dreams of Heroes, Adolfo Bioy Casares assembles magicians, prophetic and brave women, shamefully self-conscious men and Buenos Aires under the rubric of a sinister and mocking fate, and thrusts them forward into the dizzying realm of memory, doom and cyclical time. Written in 1954 and never before published in America, The Dream of Heroes stands as a predecessor of and model for a whole school of European and American novels that followed but never quite matched it.