Not only was her work among the most exciting and innovative published in the 1930s, it was unique in portraying an avant-garde woman's view of women in São Paulo during that audacious period. Industrial Park, first published in 1933, is Galvão's most notable literary achievement. Like Döblin's portrayal of Berlin in Alexanderplatz or Biely's St Petersburg, it is a book about the voices, clashes, and traffic of a city in the middle of rapid change. It includes fragments of public documents as well as dialogue and narration, giving a panorama of the city in a sequence of colorful slices. The novel dramatizes the problems of exploitation, poverty, racial prejudice, prostitution, state repression, and neocolonialism, but it is by no means a doctrinaire tract. Galvão's ironic wit pervades the novel, aspiring not only to describe the teeming city but also to put art and politics in each other's service. Like many of her contemporaries, Galvão was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party. She attracted Party criticism for her unorthodox behavior and outspokenness. A visit to Moscow in 1934 disenchanted her with the communist state, but she continued to militate for change upon returning to Brazil. She was imprisoned and tortured under the Vargas dictatorship between 1935 and 1940. In the 1940s she returned to the public through her journalism and literary activities. She died in 1962.

    . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster.In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. Apart from being a new translation, this edition includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.

    This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.

    Full of invention, they display Bulgakov's breathtaking stylistic range, moving at dizzying speed from grotesque satire to science fiction, from the plainest realism to the most madcap of fantasies. Diaboliad is a wonderful introduction to literature's most uncategorisable and subversive genius.

    Bach, surpassing all expectations, creates an aria containing thirty variations that became known as the Goldberg Variations, in honour of its first performer, put in charge of playing the piece night after night until the count fell asleep. With this story, Luis Sagasti opens a hypnotic tale full of counterpoints that, just like the Variations, sets out to follow the turns of a melody so as to arrive at the final aria­—where­ everything begins again.Like Goldberg repeating melodies over and over for the Count to rest, Sagasti narrates for us a thousand and one stories that take the reader from Bach to Gould, from Gould to the Beatles, from Sergeant Pepper to the music that was played in Nazi concentration camps, and from there to 4’33’’ by John Cage, to The Who and so on, ad infinitum. But when do we end a story? When do we decide to sing the final lullaby? For Sagasti, undoubtedly, the cosmic order is a musical one.

    Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O'Brien has called Tolstaya "an enchantress." Anita Desai has spoken of her work's "richness and ardent life." Mixing heartbreak and humor, dizzying flights of fantasy and plunging descents to earth, Tolstaya is the natural successor in a great Russian literary lineage that includes Gogol, Yuri Olesha, Bulgakov, and Nabokov.White Walls is the most comprehensive collection of Tolstaya's short fiction to be published in English so far. It presents the contents of her two previous collections, On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog, along with several previously uncollected stories. Tolstaya writes of lonely children and lost love, of philosophers of the absurd and poets working as janitors, of angels and halfwits. She shows how the extraordinary will suddenly erupt in the midst of ordinary life, as she explores the human condition with a matchless combination of unbound imagination and unapologetic sympathy. A New York Review Books Original "Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down." --Time

    Mao, at least, is still on view for the masses to see, some two decades after his demise. But no corpse engendered as much intrigue as that of Eva Peron. Elevated to near sainthood in Argentina after her death in 1952, her perfectly preserved corpse was seized by the Argentine Army following the ouster of her husband in 1955. By then, her corpse was the equivalent of a sacred relic, and while army officials wanted to keep it out of the hands of Peronists, they were loath to destroy the corpse for fear of the wrath that might follow. Tomas Eloy Martinez has reassembled the story of the corpse of Eve Peron in Santa Evita, and in the process, produced a riveting, rich book that not only tells the tale of one of the more bizarre sagas in the history of South American politics, but that also gets to the heart of the age-old human impulse to create myths and tell stories.

    Ranging from the 19th to the 20th centuries, writers include James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Richard Edward Connell, Henri Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Jack London, Henri Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe.

    The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions, The Obscene Bird of Night is a triumph of imaginative, visionary writing. Its luxuriance, fecundity, horror, and energy will not soon fade from the reader’s mind.The story is like a great puzzle . . . invested with a vibrant, almost tangible reality.—The New York TimesAlthough many of the other “boom” writers may have received more attention—especially Fuentes and Vargas Llosa—Donoso and his masterpiece may be the most lasting, visionary, strangest of the books from this time period. Seriously, it’s a novel about the last member of an aristocratic family, a monstrous mutant, who is surrounded by other freaks so as to not feel out of place.—Publishers WeeklyNicola Barker has said: "I'm no expert on the topic of South American literature (in fact I'm a dunce), but I have reason to believe (after diligently scouring the internet) that Chile's Jose Donoso, while a very highly regarded author on home turf, is little known on this side of the Atlantic. His masterpiece is the fabulously entitled The Obscene Bird of Night. It would be a crass understatement to say that this book is a challenging read; it's totally and unapologetically psychotic. It's also insanely gothic, brilliantly engaging, exquisitely written, filthy, sick, terrifying, supremely perplexing, and somehow connives to make the brave reader feel like a tiny, sleeping gnat being sucked down a fabulously kaleidoscopic dream plughole."

    from Cuba. Filled with puns, wordplay, lists upon lists, and Sternean typography--such as the section entitled "Some Revelations," which consists of several blank pages--this novel has been praised as a more modern, sexier, funnier, Cuban Ulysses. Centering on the recollections of a man separated from both his country and his youth, Cabrera Infante creates an enchanting vision of life and the many colorful characters found in steamy Havana's pre-Castro cabaret society.

      Teo Avelar is a loner. He lives with his paraplegic mother and her dog in Rio de Janeiro, he doesn't have many friends, and the only time he feels honest human emotion is in the presence of his medical school cadaver—that is, until he meets Clarice. She's almost his exact opposite: exotic, spontaneous, unafraid to speak her mind. An aspiring screenwriter, she's working on a screenplay called Perfect Days about three friends who go on a road trip across Brazil in search of romance. Teo is obsessed. He begins to stalk her, first following her to her university, then to her home, and when she ultimately rejects him, he kidnaps her and they embark upon their very own twisted odyssey across Brazil, tracing the same route outlined in her screenplay. Through it all, Teo is certain that time is all he needs to prove to Clarice that they are made for each other, that time is all he needs to make her fall in love with him. But as the journey progresses, he digs himself deeper and deeper into a pit that he can't get out of, stopping at nothing to ensure that no one gets in the way of their life together. Both tense and lurid, and brimming with suspense from the very first page, Perfect Days is a psychological thriller in the vein of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley—a chilling journey in the passenger seat with a psychopath, and the English language debut of one of Brazil's most deliciously dark young writers.

    Handsome, rich and married to a beautiful wife, Ricardo seemed to have everything to live for. So why did he take his own life?But when the police arrive at the scene, Carvalho's death looks like a straight-forward case of robbery gone horribly wrong, since the victim's gun and briefcase are nowhere to be found. And so Inspector Espinosa is called in to investigate. Not your typical detective, the world-weary Espinosa has the mind of a philosopher, the heart of a romantic, and enough experience to realize that things are not always as they seem.

    Italo Calvino's writing explores the fringes of these small, unusual scenes and finds incalculable wisdom and humour there.This book contains The Queen's Necklace and The Workshop Hen.

    Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer.Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.

    The acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has greatly revised her original translation, enlivening afresh this remarkable work.