Book picks similar to
Correr el tupido velo by Pilar Donoso


chile
no-ficción
latinoámerica
biography

I Know a Woman: The Inspiring Connections Between the Women Who Have Shaped Our World


Kate Hodges - 2018
    Here, the extraordinary achievements, relationships and secret histories of 84 pioneering women are revealed in inspirational stories which together show the indomitable strength of womankind. From ground-breaking scientist Marie Curie to political activist Malala Yousafzai, from feminist author Virginia Woolf to the game-changing Billie Jean King; I Know a Woman creates a gigantic web of womanhood which celebrates the relationships between the world’s most inspirational and influential women. Threading tales from across the globe and throughout history, the lives of innovative aviatrixes, gun-toting revolutionaries and women with incomparable intellects are revealed. Each woman is connected to the next, discovering the women behind the scenes; those who didn’t get the credit for scientific discoveries, sporting achievements or acts of bravery when they were alive. Some names will be familiar, some might not, but all are equally important. With compelling story-telling and beautifully illustrated portraits, I Know a Woman is bold and engaging with a unique purpose: to uncover the links between 84 pioneering women. Featuring Michelle Obama, Gala Dali, Emma Watson, Nina Simone, Frida Kahlo, Coco Chanel, Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and many more pioneering women who have shaped the world we live in today.

Malinche


Laura Esquivel - 2005
    Malinalli's Indian tribe has been conquered by the warrior Aztecs. When her father is killed in battle, she is raised by her wisewoman grandmother who imparts to her the knowledge that their founding forefather god, Quetzalcoatl, had abandoned them after being made drunk by a trickster god and committing incest with his sister. But he was determined to return with the rising sun and save her tribe from their present captivity. When Malinalli meets Cortez she, like many, suspects that he is the returning Quetzalcoatl, and assumes her task is to welcome him and help him destroy the Aztec empire and free her people. The two fall passionately in love, but Malinalli gradually comes to realize that Cortez's thirst for conquest is all too human, and that for gold and power, he is willing to destroy anyone, even his own men, even their own love.

Becoming Che


Carlos Calica Ferrer - 2004
    As in his first trip with Alberto Granado, this second journey was an encounter with the roots of indigenous America, with the incipient people’s movements and all the beauty and suffering of a continent oppressed for centuries.“The name of the sidekick has changed from Alberto to Calica, but the trip is the same: two free-spirits spanning out over South America without knowing exactly what they're looking for or which way is north,” wrote Guevara in his travel diary.The two friends explore Bolivia, Perú and Ecuador, alternating their enthusiasm for travel and youthful antics with revealing discoveries about social and political reality in Latin America, in the end turning the trip into a profound journey of self-discovery that would change them forever.The book presents previously unpublished photos from Calica’s personal album that portray the childhood and youth of the two friends in the town of Alta Gracia in the Province of Córdoba, Argentina, as well as their trip together.Alberto Granado, friend of both Ernesto and Calica, prologues the book and finishes with these words:“Thank you, Calica, for having brought this breath of fresh air and showing us our friend just as he was, is and always will be: a man of flesh and blood.”

Magnetized: Conversations with a Serial Killer


Carlos Busqued - 2018
    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.

Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz


Olga Lengyel - 1947
    This true, documented chronicle is the intimate, day-to-day record of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare of Auschwitz and Birchenau. Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, Five Chimneys does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her "very frank, very well written book". This book is a necessary reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization. It was a shocking experience. It is a shocking book.

Hija de Revolucionarios


Laurence Debray - 2017
    Her parents came from wealthy families, and both embraced the revolutionary cause of Castro. In this sincere book, Laurence Debray tells the myth and truth of her revolutionary parents and of her own life.

Sold


Zana Muhsen - 1991
    When her father told her she was to spend a holiday with relatives in North Yemen, she jumped at the chance. Aged 15 and 13 respectively, Zana and her sister discovered that they had been literally sold into marriage, and that on their arrival they were virtually prisoners. They had to adapt to a completely alien way of life, with no running water, dung-plastered walls, frequent beatings, and the ordeal of childbirth on bare floors with only old women in attendance. After eight years of misery and humiliation Zana succeeded in escaping, but her sister is still there, and it seems likely that she will now never leave the country where she has spent more than half her life. This is an updated edition of Zana's account of her experiences.

The Queen of the South


Arturo Pérez-Reverte - 2002
    Teresa Mendoza is his girlfriend, a typical narco's morra-- quiet, doting, submissive. But then Guero's caught playing both sides, and in Sinaloa, that means death. Teresa finds herself alone, terrified, friendless and running to save her life, carrying nothing but a gym bag containing a pistol and a notebook that she has been forbidden to read. Forced to leave Mexico, she flees to the Spanish city of Melilla, where she meets Santiago Fisterra, a Galician involved in trafficking hashish across the Strait of Gibraltar. When Santiago's partner is captured, it is Teresa who steps in to take his place. Now Teresa has plunged into the dark and ugly world that once claimed Guero's life-- and she's about to get in deeper...

Pablo Escobar, In fraganti


Juan Pablo Escobar - 2016
    "My father worked for the CIA and cocaine was used to finance terrorist groups fighting communism in Central America." "TV shows like Narcos glorify corruption and cover up for those who helped my father become so evil: American and Colombian corrupted politicians and so-called democratic institutions."

Sally Heathcote: Suffragette


Mary M. Talbot - 2014
    A tale of loyalty, love and courage, set against a vividly realised backdrop of Edwardian Britain, it follows the fortunes of a maid-of-all-work swept up in the feminist militancy of the era. Sally Heathcote: Suffragette is another stunning collaboration from Costa Award winners, Mary and Bryan Talbot. Teamed up with acclaimed illustrator Kate Charlesworth, Sally Heathcote's lavish pages bring history to life.

Never Any End to Paris


Enrique Vila-Matas - 2003
    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.

With Borges


Alberto Manguel - 2002
    This is a moving portrait of an enigmatic genius, replete with deep insight into Borges and the writers he most admired.Alberto Manguel is an internationally acclaimed anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist and editor, and is the author of several award-winning books including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading.He was born in Buenos Aires, became a Canadian citizen in 1982 and now lives in France, where he was named Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

How I Came Into My Inheritance: And Other True Stories


Dorothy Gallagher - 2001
    Nothing she invented, however, could rival the facts surrounding her own family.In a singular voice–intimate, fierce, hilarious–Gallagher takes you into the heart of her Russian Jewish heritage with stories as elegant and stylish as fiction. From the wrenching last stages of her parents’ lives, Gallagher moves back through time: to her parents’ beginnings, the adventures of her extended family, and the communist ideology to which they cling. Her aunt Lily sells lingerie to prostitutes; a family friend is found murdered in a bathtub; her cousin Meyer returns to the Ukraine to find his village near death from starvation; and a young Gallagher endures sessions in self-criticism at a Workers’ Children’s camp. Together these episodes tell the larger story of a generation living through tumultuous history, and record the acts of loving defiance of a daughter on her path to independence. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Así habló Zaratustra/Más allá del bien y el mal/El anticristo/El ocaso de los ídolos


Friedrich Nietzsche - 1883
    A wonderful introduction to world literature, this finely crafted and affordable series offers the works of these world-renowned authors to a wider audience.Includes "The Antichrist," "Beyond Good and Evil," and "Twilight of the Idols,"

62: A Model Kit


Julio Cortázar - 1968
    This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, "seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!" It is the meeting place for a wild assortment of bohemians in a novel described by The New York Times as "Deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious." Library Journal has said 62: A Model Kit is "a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time."