Book picks similar to
View of Dawn in the Tropics, a Novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
latin-american
fiction
cuban
western-canon
The Occasions
Eugenio Montale - 1949
This book is his most experimental work, but a work no less tradition-saturated than Eliot's. As poet, private individual, and "good European", Montale's way of dealing with his difficulties was to seize the occasions offered him by writing poetry in which the lover's passions for his beloved country would convey the truth of both his public and his private situations.
Drown
Junot Díaz - 1995
Diaz's work is unflinching and strong, and these stories crackle with an electric sense of discovery. Diaz evokes a world in which fathers are gone, mothers fight with grim determination for their families and themselves, and the next generation inherits the casual cruelty, devastating ambivalence, and knowing humor of lives circumscribed by poverty and uncertainty. In Drown, Diaz has harnessed the rhythms of anger and release, frustration and joy, to indelible effect.
Collected Stories of John O'Hara
John O'Hara - 1984
American LiteratureContains:The doctor's son -- It must have been spring -- Over the river and through the wood -- Price's always open -- Are we leaving tomorrow? -- Pal Joey -- The gentleman in the tan suit -- Good-bye, Herman -- Olive -- Do you like it here? -- Now we know -- Free -- Too young -- Bread alone -- Graven image -- Common sense should tell you -- Drawing room B -- The pretty daughters - The moccasins -- Imagine kissing Pete -- The girl from California -- In the silence -- Exactly eight thousand dollars exactly -- Winter dance -- The flatted saxophone -- The friends of Miss Julia -- How can I tell you? -- Ninety minutes away -- Our friend the sea -- Can I stay here? -- The hardware man -- The pig -- Zero -- Fatimas and kisses -- Natica Jackson -- We'll have fun.
Three Plays: Amédée / The New Tenant / Victims of Duty
Eugène Ionesco - 1958
This crucial collection combines The New Tenant with Amédée and Victims of Duty—the plays Richard Gilman has called, along with The Killer, Ionesco’s “greatest plays, works of the same solidity, fulness, and permanence as [those of] his predecessors in the dramatic revolution that began with Ibsen and is still going on.”In Amédée, the title character and his wife have a problem—not so much the corpse in their bedroom as the fact that it’s been there for fifteen years and is now growing, slowly but surely crowding them out of their apartment.In The New Tenant a similar crowding is caused by an excess of furniture—as Harold Hobson said in the London Times, “there is not dramatist . . . who can make furniture speak as eloquently as Ionesco, and here he makes it the perfect, the terrifying symbol of the deranged mind.”In Victims of Duty, Ionesco parodies the conformity of modern life by plunging his characters into an obscure search for “Mallot with a t.” In these as in all his plays, Ionesco poses and solves his tragicomic dilemmas with the brilliant blend of gravity and hilarity that is the hallmark of the absurdist theater.
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Álvaro Mutis - 1993
His extravagant and hopeless undertakings, his brushes with the law and scrapes with death, and his enduring friendships and unlooked-for love affairs make him a Don Quixote for our day, driven from one place to another by a restless and irregular quest for the absolute. Álvaro Mutis's seven dazzling chronicles of the adventures and misadventures of Maqroll have won him numerous honors and a passionately devoted readership throughout the world. Here for the first time in English all these wonderful stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's prize-winning translation.
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge
Delmore Schwartz - 1967
Summer Knowledge won for him both the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. lronically, indeed tragically, the praise and prizes Schwartz's poems received did not forestall his decline, and this, his poetic testament, proved to be a final one as well. Overcome by mental illness, alienated from his friends and supporters, he disappeared from the literary scene, in the end to die in 1966 in an obscure Broadway hotel. The tragedy of his life pales before the triumph of his art and craft. Selected Poems clearly places him among the foremost poets of his generation.
The Story of My Teeth
Valeria Luiselli - 2013
But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming.Highway is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the "notorious infamous" like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli's own literary influences.
A Fanatic Heart
Edna O'Brien - 1984
Her stories portray a young Irish girl's view of obsessive love and its often wrenching pain, while tales of contemporary life show women who open themselves to sexuality, to disappointment, to madness. Throughout, there is always O'Brien's voicewondrous, despairing, movingexamining passionate subjects that lay bare the desire and needs that can be hidden in a woman's heart.
The Woman of the Pharisees
François Mauriac - 1941
The Woman of the Pharisees--one of Mauriac's most accomplished novels--is a penetrating evocation of the moral and religious values of a Bordeaux community. In Brigitte, we see how the ideals of love and companionship are stifled in the presence of a self-righteous woman whose austere religious principals lead her to interfere--disastrously--in the lives of others. One by one the unwitting victims fall prey to the bleakness of her "perfection." A conscientious schoolteacher, a saintly priest, her husband and stepdaughter and an innocent schoolboy are all confronted with tragedy and upheaval. But the author's extraordinary gift for psychological insight goes on to show how redeeming features inevitably surface from disaster. The unfolding drama is seen through the discerning eye of a young Louis--Brigitte's stepson--whose point of view is skillfully blended into the mature and understanding adult he later becomes.
The House with the Green Shutters
George Douglas Brown - 1901
It is probably semi-autobiographical : Brown was illegitimate and rejected by his father and the village of Barbie is loosely based on Ochiltree in Ayrshire. The brutish John Gourlay is a merchant in the village of Barbie, envied and resented by the villagers because of his success, which is symbolized in his prestigious house with green shutters. He dominates and bullies his family, in particular his sensitive, gifted but weak son. Ultimately, his refusal to acknowledge the arrival of the railway and to adapt to the increasing industrialization of Ayrhire precipitates murder, suicide, and his family's tragic downfall.
Havana Blue
Leonardo Padura - 1991
Though it’s the middle of a weekend, he is asked to urgently investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. Conde remembered Morin from their student days: good-looking, brilliant, a “reliable comrade’’ who always got what he wanted, including Tamara, the girl Conde was after.But Rafael Morin’s exemplary rise from a poor barrio and picture-perfect life hides more than one suspicious episode worthy of investigation. While pursuing the case in a decaying but adored Havana, Conde confronts his lost love for Tamara and the dreams and illusions of his generation.
A Cool Million
Nathanael West - 1934
Like many an Alger, Lemuel Pitkin leaves his home on the farm to seek his fortune in the Big City. By the time he is through, he has been robbed, bilked, thrown in jail, has lost his teeth, his eye, a leg, his scalp, and has witnessed a remarkable number of rapes and political riots. Others in the cast: an ex-president of the United States (just released from jail); Lem's childhood sweetheart (now working in a Mott Street bordello); an oil-rich Indian; a Western desperado; and assorted agents and thugs of the Communists, Fascists and International Bankers. Through the story of Lemuel Pitkin, the four-square, All-American hero, and his sad fate at the hands of rabble-rousers and charlatans, West etched a classic parable of America in the chaotic Thirties.
Yo!
Julia Alvarez - 1997
In the process, she has managed to get kicked out of college, break more than a few hearts, have her own heart broken many times, return for extended visits to the Dominican Republic her family fled when she was a child, and marry three times. She has also infuriated her entire family by publishing the intimate details of their lives as fiction.This brilliant novel is a full and true exploration of a woman's soul, a meditation on the writing life, and a lyrical account of the immigrant's search for identity and a place in the world. !Yo!'s bright colors, zesty dialogue, warm feeling, and genuine insight could only come from the palette of Julia Alvarez.Description from Penguin Group.