In the wake of his father's premature death, Jose Cemi comes of age in a turn of the century Cuba described in the Washington Post as "an island paradise where magic and philosophy twist the lives of the old Cuban bourgeoisie into extravagant wonderful shapes."

    The garden burns with sunlight; the macaws laugh sweetly. Otilia, Ismail's wife, is ashamed of his peeping and suggests that he pay a visit to Father Albornoz. Instead, Ismail wanders the town visiting old friends, plagued by a tangle of secret memories. "Where have I existed these years? I answer myself; up on the wall, peering over." When the armies slowly arrive, the profesor's reveries are gradually taken over by a living hell. His wife disappears and he must find her. We learn that not only gentle, grassy hillsides surround San Joseacute; but landmines and coca fields. The reader is soon engulfed by the violence of Rosero's narrative that is touched not only with a deep sadness, but an extraordinary tenderness.

    It's a book to relish, to read and re-read. Unforgettable." --Salmon RushdieAn electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer ("A wonderfully free and original talent"--Harold Pinter) and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution.Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels.Her memoir is both a revelatory insider's account of the Revolution and a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Belli writes with both striking lyricism and candor about her personal and political lives: about her family, her children, the men in her life; about her poetry; about the dichotomies between her birth-right and the life she chose for herself; about the failures and triumphs of the Revolution; about her current life, divided between California (with her American husband and their children) and Nicaragua; and about her sustained and sustaining passion for her country and its people.

    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.

    The assailant: a nineteen-year-old boy, odd and taciturn, who gave the impression of being completely sane. But the crimes themselves were not: four murders, as exact as they were senseless.More than thirty years later, Argentine author Carlos Busqued began visiting Ricardo Melogno, the serial killer, in prison. Their conversations return to the nebulous era of the crimes and a story full of missing pieces. The result is a book at once hypnotic and unnerving, constructed from forensic documents, newspaper clippings, and interviews with Melogno himself. Without imposing judgment, Busqued allows for the killer to describe his way of retreating from the world and to explain his crimes as best he can. In his own words, Melogno recalls a visit from Pope Francis, grim depictions of daily life in prison, and childhood remembrances of an unloving mother who drove her son to Brazil to study witchcraft. As these conversations progress, the focus slowly shifts from the crimes themselves, to Melogno’s mistreatment and mis-diagnosis while in prison, to his current fate: incarcerated in perpetuity despite having served his full sentence.Using these personal interviews, alongside forensic documents and newspaper clippings, Busqued crafted Magnetized, a captivating story about one man’s crimes, and a meditation on how one chooses to inhabit the world, or to become absent from it.

    Ángel Santiago, a youth determined to avenge abuse he received in jail, seeks out the notorious bank robber Nicolás Vergara Grey, whose front-page exploits won him a reputation he would rather leave behind. Their plan for an ambitious and daring robbery is complicated by the galvanizing presence of Victoria Ponce, a virtuosic dancer and high-school dropout whose father was a victim of the regime. Praised for his “ability to place a personal story in the context of a national upheaval and make it warm, funny and universal” (San Francisco Chronicle), Antonio Skármeta sets this exuberant love story against the backdrop of the new Chile, free from the Pinochet dictatorship but beholden to the perils of globalization. The Dancer and the Thief, which won Spain’s prestigious Planeta Prize, is a remarkable new novel from one of South America’s finest storytellers.

    Known to millions by his pen name, Peter Hook, Fresan's hero has survived the death of his rock-star parents, and a childhood surrounded by 1960s excess, to become the most successful children's author of his generation, best loved as the creator of the time-traveling boy Jim Yang.Over the course of one night, Peter tells his life story--and that of J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan--to the child actor cursed with playing Jim Yang in the movies. Gradually, a fantastical and terrible tale emerges, a tale of shadow identities and suicide, lost boys and foundlings. Moving between the Edwardian age and Swinging London, "Kensington Gardens "is an exploration of the charms and perils of nostalgia and children's literature from one of Latin America's most celebrated young novelists.

    The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger—after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

    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."

    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.

    He ravaged the coasts of Cuba and America, striking terror wherever he went. Morgan was obsessive. He had two driving ambitions: to possess the beautiful woman called La Santa Roja and to conquer Panama, the “cup of gold.” Steinbeck’s first novel and sole work of historical fiction, Cup of Gold is a lush, lyrical swashbuckling pirate fantasy, and sure to add new dimensions to readers’ perceptions of this all-American writer. This edition features an introduction by Susan F. Beegel.

    In a prison in the pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela, an artist sketches the famous porch of the cathedral, the Portico da Gloria. He uses a carpenter's pencil. But instead of reproducing the sculptured faces of the prophets and elders, he draws the faces of his fellow Republican prisoners.Many years later in post-Franco Spain, a survivor of that period, Doctor Daniel da Barca, returns from exile to his native Galicia, and the threads of past memories begin to be woven together. This poetic and moving novel conveys the horror and savagery of the tragedy that divided Spain, and the experiences of the men and women who lived through it. Yet in the process, it also relates one of the most beautiful love stories imaginable.

    A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People.” His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the “man who tortured people” to places that archives can’t reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel’s title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.

    for ISBN 037572706X.The remarkable bestseller about the fourth-century Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity, Julian is widely regarded as one of Gore Vidal’s finest historical novels.Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshiping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign. A marvelously imaginative and insightful novel of classical antiquity, Julian captures the religious and political ferment of a desperate age and restores with blazing wit and vigor the legacy of an impassioned ruler.

    As with his predecessors in the -genre of the strange- Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, the apparent eccentricities in Felisberto Hernandez's stories create a coherent system of allusions and correspondences, a system that reaches its summit in masterpieces such as -Las Hortensias- and -La casa inundada-. As Hoffmann, who preceded him, and Cortazar, who followed, Felisberto turned away from the literary trends of his times and departed on his own journey, undertaking the task of redefining the human being and replacing the accepted notion of material reality with what he called -the mystery-: small and deep daily realities that fall outside an ever narrowing focus on the homogenous and utilitarian. A trained musician and composer, Felisberto elaborated his literary compositions as musical structures, based on the relations among notes and phrases. Thus, Felisberto Hernandez's short stories cannot be approached and read as isolated pieces if the reader intends to grasp the complexity lying deep below the surface. In this edition Ana Maria Hernandez -who bears the same name as Felisbertos' second daughter and teaches Advanced Spanish Composition at CUNY- analyzes the gradual development of Felisberto's theory and praxis of composition by commenting on his most representative short stories and emphasizing the intertextuality of the recurring symbols and themes throughout his literary production. This approach transforms this edition in an exceptional basis for Creative Writing and Advanced Spanish Composition courses, exposing students to texts that exerted a noticeable influence upon acclaimed writers such as Julio Cortazar -his biggest fan- Juan Carlos Onetti, and Italo Calvino, and provoked one of the biggest critical blunders by the otherwise sharp critic Emir Rodriguez Monegal."