Search results for ""charco press""

Lucía and Pablo are Colombian immigrants who’ve built their lives together in the US yet maintain conflicting attitudes towards their homeland and the extent to which it defines their identity. After undergoing fertility treatment, Pablo finds himself excluded from raising their twins, and the new family situation seems to question the very nature of their relationship and of who they believed they were. In search of respite and time to reflect, Lucía takes the kids to her parents’ apartment in Miami. Meanwhile, Pablo learns he is suffering from a syndrome known as ‘Holiday Heart’. But is this just a break, or is it really the final days of their marriage?

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Winner PEN Translates Award (UK)Recovering from an unspecified accident, the narrator of Loop finds herself in waiting rooms of different kinds: airport departure lounges, doctors’ surgeries, and above all at home, awaiting the return of her boyfriend, who has travelled to Spain following the death of his mother. Loop is a love story told from the perspective of a contemporary Penelope who, instead of weaving and unravelling her shroud, writes and erases her thoughts in her ‘ideal’ notebook. At once, funny and thought-provoking, her thoughts range from her stationery preferences to the different scales on which life is lived, while a cast of unlikely characters cross the page, from Proust to a mysterious dwarf, from a dreamy cat to David Bowie singing ‘Wild is the Wind’. Written in an assured, irreverent style, Loop is the journal of an absence, one in which the most minute or whimsical observations open up universes. Combining aphoristic fragments with introspective narrative, and evoking Italo Calvino and Fernando Pessoa in its playfulness and wry humour, this original reflection on relationships, solitude and the purpose of writing offers a glimpse of contemporary life in Mexico City, while asking what it really means to find our place in the world.

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Life after crime from the International Booker-shortlisted author of Elena KnowsFifteen years after killing her husband's lover, Inés is fresh out of prison and trying to put together a new life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they've started a business FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies dedicated to pest control and private investigation, by women, for women. But Señora Bonar, one of their clients, wants Inés to do more than kill bugs she wants her expertise, and her criminal past, to help her kill her husband's lover, too.Crimes against women versus crimes by women; culpability, fallibility, and our responsibilities to each otherthis is Piñeiro at her wry, earthy best, alive to all the ways we shape ourselves to be understandable, to be understood, by family and love and other hostile forces.

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A junkie looking for one last fix in a town full of ghosts . This is a ghost story. A junkie has gone to El Zapotal to die to rent a room in this crumbling backwater, melt into one last fix, and not come back. For someone so ready to no longer be alive, though, he can't stop clinging to the past. His old dog, Kid, who he abandoned. His love, Valerie, who he introduced to drugs. There's no such thing as a good memory. El Zapotal doesn't want him either. The people aren't welcoming, the streets are empty except for strays, and he's having trouble pacing his supply. As the drugs run out, the line between what's real and what's not blurs to the point of illegibility, and we're left wandering a tenderly described hinterland of despair, hunger, and regret. García Elizondo has given us an homage to Pedro Páramo , a descent for the ages, a long goodbye with no clear line between the living and dead.

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"Sergio Chejfec is an admirable writer." —Patti Smith“Could anyone possibly believe that writing doesn’t exist? It would be like denying the existence of rain.”The perfect green notebook forms the basis for Sergio Chejfec’s work, collecting writing, and allowing it to exist in a state of permanent possibility, or, as he says, “The written word is also capable of waiting for the next opportunity to appear and to continue to reveal itself by and for itself.” This same notebook is also the jumping off point for this essay, which considers the dimensions of the act of writing (legibility, annotation, facsimile, inscription, typewriter versus word processor versus pen) as a way of thinking, as a record of relative degrees of permanence, and as a performance. From Kafka through Borges, Nabokov, Levrero, Walser, the implications of how we write take on meaning as well worth considering as what we write. This is a love letter to the act of writing as practice, bearing down on all the ways it happens (cleaning typewriter keys, the inevitable drying out of the bottle of wite-out, the difference between Word Perfect and Word) to open up all the ways in which “when we express our thought, it changes.”

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Un sensible homenaje a la narración, la infancia y el poder transformador de la música.El segundo libro traducido al inglés de Luis Sagasti emprende un recorrido circular que hace eco de las Variaciones Goldberg de Bach para narrarnos historia tras historia, al estilo de Scheherazade, entretejidas de manera sutil y sorprendente, creando un tapiz que vibra al son de armonías celestiales. Sagasti nos guía en un viaje que va desde la música nacida bajo el sol a la música enviada al espacio en la misión Voyager. Desde Rothko hasta el rock, desde aquellos compositores en los campos de concentración hasta una habitación donde se escuchan los lamentos de los reclutas argentinos en Malvinas. Un delicado homenaje a la narración, la infancia y el poder transformador de la música. The Spanish language edition of A Musical Offering_. Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach’s_ Goldberg Variations_, Luis Sagasti’s second book to appear in English takes the guise of a musical scheherazade, recounting story after story, vibrating to celestial harmonies. From the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands,_ A Musical Offering_traverses the shifting sands of fiction and history._A lyrical celebration of storytelling, of childhood, and of the transformative power of music.Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach’s Goldberg Variations , Luis Sagasti’s second book to appear in English takes the guise of a musical scheherazade, recounting story after story, vibrating to celestial harmonies. From the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands, A Musical Offering traverses the shifting sands of fiction and history.

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Byobu reveals a rich inner world, one driven by its meticulous attention to our rich outer one."a story’s existence, even if not well defined or well assigned, even if only in its formative stage, just barely latent, emits vague but urgent emanations."Byobu's every interaction trembles with possibility and faint menace. A crack in the walls of his house, marring it forever, means he must burn it down. A stoplight asks what the value of obedience is, what hopefulness it contains, and what insensible anarchy it defies. In brief episodes, aphorisms, and moments of spiritual turbulence and gentle scrutiny, reside a wealth of habits, worries, curiosities, pleasures, peculiarities, and efforts to understand.Representative of the modesty and complexity of Ida Vitale’s poetic universe, Byobu flushes the world with meaning and playfully offers another way of inhabiting the every day.

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Sex, lies, and scientific history collide in 1993 Havana.It was as if we’d reached the minimum critical point of a mathematical curve. Imagine a parabola. Zero point down, at the bottom of an abyss. That’s how low we sank.The year is 1993. Cuba is at the height of the Special Period, a widespread economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet bloc.For Julia, a mathematics lecturer who hates teaching, this is Year Zero: the lowest possible point. But a way out appears: the search for a missing document that will prove the telephone was invented in Havana, secure her reputation, and give Cuba a purpose once more. What begins as an investigation into scientific history becomes a tangle of sex, friendship, family legacies, and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.

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“This slim and vital novel is a tour de force; it will floor you, and lift you right the way up—I adored it.” —Claire-Louise Bennett , author of PONDDuring the summer of 2014, on one of the stormiest days on record to hit the coast of Uruguay, 31-year old Alejandro, lifeguard and younger brother of our protagonist and narrator, dies after being struck by lightning. This marks the opening of a novel that combines memoir and fiction, unveiling an intimate exploration of the brotherly bond, while laying bare the effects that death can have on those closest to us and also on ourselves.It’s always the happiest and most talented who die young. People who die young are always the happiest of all…Can grief be put into words? Can we truly rationalise death to the point of embracing it? Older Brother is the vehicle Mella uses to tackle these fundamental questions, playing with tenses and narrating in the future, as if all calamities described are yet to unfold. In a style reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis and J.D. Salinger, recalling in parts Cronenberg’s or Burgess’s examination of violence and society, Mella takes us with him in this dizzying journey right into the centre of his own neurosis and obsessions, where fatality is skilfully used to progressively draw the reader further in.

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This assured debut novel from acclaimed Chilean author Andrea Jeftanovic explores the devastating psychological effects of the conflict in the Balkans on a family who flee to South America to build a new life. It is told from the perspective of the young Tamara, as she tries to make sense of growing up haunted by a distant conflict. Yet the ghosts of war re-emerge in their new land – which has its own traumatic past – to tear the family apart.Staging scenes from childhood as if the characters were rehearsing for a play, the novel uses all the imaginary resources of theatre director, set paint- er and lighting designer to pose the question: how can Tamara salvage an identity as an adult from the ruins of memory, and rediscover the ability to love? With themes that echo Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul , a sensitive narrator recalling Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing , and a focus on the body in the style of Elfriede Jelinek, this is an artfully construct- ed, widely praised work from one of the most exciting novelists at work in Latin America today.

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"This is one beautiful book."—Mia CoutoKnown and celebrated in Brazil and abroad for his novel Resistance , Julián Fuks returns to his auto-fictional alter ego Sebastián in a narrative alternating between the writer’s conversations with refugees occupying a building in downtown São Paulo, his father’s sickness, and his wife’s pregnancy. With impeccable prose, the author builds associations that go beyond the obvious, not only between glimpsing a life's beginning and end, but also between the building’s occupation and his wife's pregnancy — showcasing the various forms of occupation while exposing the frailty of life, the risk of solitude and the brutality of not belonging.

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Five hundred miles from mainland Colombia, grassroots resistance, sloppy vacationers, and a muddy history of conquest converge for Verónica, returning after living in Mexico City, ready to understand herself and the place she came from.San Andrés rises gently from the Caribbean, part of Colombia but closer to Nicaragua, the largest island in an archipelago claimed by the Spanish, colonized by the Puritans, worked by slaves, and home to Arab traders, migrants from the mainland, and the descendants of everyone who came before.For Victoria – whose origins on the island go back generations, but whose identity is contested by her accent, her skin colour, her years far away – the sunburnt tourists, sewage blooms, sudden storms, and ‘thinking rundowns’ where liberation is plotted and dinner served from a giant communal pot, bring her into vivid, intimate contact with the island she thought she knew, her own history, and the possibility for a real future for herself and San Andrés.

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Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada’s latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.This masterful novel reveals once again Selva Almada's unique voice and extraordinary sensitivity, allowing its characters to shine and express in action what the depths of their souls harbour.One of the Best Books of 2020 in Clarín and La NaciónShortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Prize

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An artist races to finish his forgery of a masterpiece while held captive in surreal, menacing splendor.José Federico Burgos is a failed painter turned forger trapped in surreal, an architectural masterpiece hidden behind high walls, an impish vagabond, and some very resourceful, very intimidating twins—Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragán, traversing late 20th Century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th Century picaresque.

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