Search results for ""Charco Press""

Explorers, Dreamers and Thieves is an adventure through memory and archives. This book is an exercise in invention that emerges from the complex history of encounter between Europe and the Americas. Following the success ofUntold Microcosms which saw ten Latin American authors write stories inspired by objects from their countries held by the British Museum the curatorial team at the Museum and at Hay Festival have joined forces again, this time with a slightly different proposal.Six writers Selva Almada ,Rita Indiana ,Josefa Sánchez ,Philippe Sands ,Juan Gabriel Vásquez andGabriela Weiner were invited to examine a series of ethnographic documents: a profusion of diaries, letters, drawings, thoughts and transactions, all referring to the acquisition of works for the collection. Using this material as a starting point, they were asked to imagine narratives about the people involved in bringing those pieces to the museum. The journey through these texts is not unlike the one that, i

Read more less

After her ex-husband dies unexpectedly, Nora García travels to the funeral, back to a Mexican village from her past and the art and music of their life together.The way you hold a cello, the way light lands on a Caravaggio, the way the castrati hit notes like no one else could—a lifetime of conversations about art and music and history unfolds for Nora García as she and a crowd of friends and fans send off her recently deceased ex-husband, Juan. Like any good symphony, there are themes and repetitions and contrapuntal notes. We pingpong back and forth between Nora’s life with Juan (a renowned pianist and composer, and just as accomplished a raconteur) and the present day (the presentness of the past), where she sits among his familiar things, next to his coffin, breathing in the particular mix of mildew and lilies that overwhelm this day and her thoughts. In Glantz’s hands, music and art access our most intimate selves, illustrating and creating our identities, and offering us ways to express love and loss and bewilderment when words cannot suffice. As Nora says, “Life is an absurd wound: I think I deserve to be given condolences.”

Read more less

My brother is adopted, but I can’t say and don’t want to say that my brother is adopted. If I say this, if I speak these words that I have long taken care to silence, I reduce my brother to a single categorical condition, a single essential attribute...A young couple, involved in the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, must flee the country. The brutality and terror of the regime is closing in around them. Friends are being ‘disappeared’. Their names are on a list. Time is running out. When they leave, they take with them their infant son, adopted after years of trying for a child without success. They build a new life in Brazil and things change radically. The family grows as the couple have two more children: a son and a daughter.Resistance unfolds as an intimate portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child. It’s an examination of identity, of family bonds, of the different forms that exile can take, of what it means to belong to a place, to a family, to your own past.Already winner of the Jabuti Award for Book of the Year 2016 (Brazil), the José Saramago Literary Prize 2017 (Portugal) and the Anna Seghers Prize 2018 (Germany), Resistance demonstrates remarkable courage and skill by one of Brazil’s rising literary stars.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 20201872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina’s richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building.This subversive retelling of Argentina’s foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro is a celebration of the colour and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humour and sophistication, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara has created a joyful, hallucinatory novel that is also an incisive critique of national myths.

Read more less

Following the international success of Die, My Love (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2018), Ariana Harwicz again takes us into the darkest recesses of the imagination with this delirious, furious account of a mother and daughter bound by chaos as much as love. Driven to the edge by the men in their lives, they oscillate between erratic bursts of housework, lazing in the garden, and drunken escapades. But is the constant undercurrent of violence all in the daughter’s mind or will they actually go through with their plan for revenge? With a shocking, edge-of-the-seat finale worthy of Thelma & Louise if it were remade by David Lynch, Feebleminded is a wild ride of a novel with echoes of Ágota Kristóf, Elfriede Jelinek and Alan Warner, and will leave you both shaken and begging for more.

Read more less

Life under Brazil's brutal cordial racism comes painfully alive in this novel of fathers and sons. How do you become the protagonist of your own life? For Pedro, it means searching for himself in the objects his father left behind: the layers that make up his life, and that of his parents, and the circumstances, geographies, and wounds that shaped them all. It's an archaeology of affections, but also of life in southern Brazil, where being black on the streets of Porto Alegre manifests violences large and small. Where being a young woman, raised by a single mother, may find you seeking security in the untrustworthy arms of men.In Dark Side of Skin , Jeferson Tenório takes on fathers and sons, Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the inescapable bonds and burdens of family and history in one delicately rendered, painfully precise account of loved ones lost and found.

Read more less

From the author of Elena Knows , finalist for the 2022 International Booker Prize20 years after a shocking accident, Mary Lohan returns to the Buenos Aires suburb she escaped in a fugue of guilt and isolation. She is not the same—not her name or voice, not even the color of her eyes. The neighborhood looks different too, but she’s still the same woman and it’s still the same place, and as the past erupts into view, they slowly collide. A Little Luck is the story about the debilitating weight of lies, the messy line between bravery and cowardice, and the tragedies, big and small, that can ripple out from a single decisive event. In a place she had determined to forget forever, both anticipated encounters and unanticipated revelations show her, and us, that sometimes life is neither fate nor chance: perhaps it’s nothing more than a little luck.

Read more less

How do you will a life into order? Adrift in Germany, a pregnant, aimless Argentine and her small circle of friends try and fail to find out.Fall in Heidelberg, and in a student residence a not-student, a woman from Argentina, is busy not figuring out what to do next. She’s pregnant. Shanice, a Japanese student she had barely befriended, has died. Shanice’s mother has arrived from Tokyo and will not leave. And Javier Miguel, a fellow Argentine, is frantic that his sister back home might be overly involved with a local psychic. The German Room is a novel of not-moving on, of not-growing up, of not-failing better. As fall turns to winter, things change but nothing is different, and comedy and tragedy are harder to tell apart. And in Carla Maliandi’s hands, entropy becomes a vibrant, life-affirming creative force.

Read more less

A taut, appealing, and often quite funny exploration of existential angst."—Kirkus ReviewsIn a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy.The room is kept clean and tidy, nobody talks about it and nobody is allowed to use it. It is for the president and no one else. But what if he doesn’t come? And what if he does? As events unfold, the reader is kept in the dark about what’s really going on. So much so, in fact, that we begin to wonder if even the narrator can be trusted...Ricardo Romero has been compared to Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino, and we see why in this eerie, meditative novel narrated by a shy young boy who seems to be very good at lying about the truth. Following in the footsteps of Julio Cortázar and a certain literary tradition of sinister rooms (such as Dr Jekyll’s laboratory), The President’s Room is a mysterious tale based on the suspicion that a house is never just one single home.

Read more less

How do we even begin to narrate the history of the world? Where do we start, and where do we end? Fireflies is Sagasti’s bold and original attempt to answer these questions. Roaming across time and geography, he lights on an eclectic array of characters and events that at first glance seem unrelated, and teases out their stories to reveal unexpected points of contact between them. Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Beuys, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Neil Armstrong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Beatles, Japanese poets, Brazilian priests, Russian cosmonauts and many more cross these pages, and Sagasti finds common threads that weave them together into a single narrative.The fireflies themselves perhaps provide the key to understanding this book. They become a metaphor for the resistance of certain luminous moments, certain twinkling fragments of history, to the passing of time. They remind us that events do not always simply disappear neatly into the darkness, but rather remain, floating in the air, lighting up the night sky indefinitely. Sagasti shows us that the present moment, like this novel, is a tapestry woven of a multiplicity of times.Using his unique, poetic and keenly observant style, Sagasti transforms the accidents of history into a single, lyrical constellation, and for the reader it is an extraordinary sight.

Read more less

SHORTLISTED for the International Booker Prize 2022After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.

Read more less

"His stories shimmer like revelations – the clarity, mystery, beauty, depth, and sheer, thrilling peculiarity of ordinary life when the veil lifts. They’re exhilarating to read, just as exhilarating to re-read." —Deborah EisenbergChildhood does not last long in the Argentine mountains of Córdoba, and adult lives fall apart quickly. In disarming, darkly humorous stories, Federico Falco explores themes of obsessive love, romantic attachment and the strategies we must find to cope with death and painful longing.In the middle of a blizzard a widow watches the ruin of her late-husband’s garden, until suddenly she sees a woman running naked in the falling snow. After telling her parents she is abandoning her Christian faith, a girl becomes infatuated with a Mormon missionary who reminds her of a boy killed in her village years before. When his family’s home is lost, a father desperately offers his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who will take them in. And a town’s mayor tries to fulfill his father’s dying wish – to design the perfect cemetery.

Read more less

Brutal y sobrecogedora, una novela con la dictadura argentina como telón de fondo.Tres historias que forman parte de una misma historia. En 1941, en una ciudad de provincias argentina, una niña confiesa a un sacerdote los primeros y difusos impulsos sexuales que nota en su cuerpo, relacionados con la atracción que siente por un joven apellidado Videla que pasa cada día bajo su ventana. En 1977 un grupo de jóvenes revolucionarios prepara un atentado en un aeródromo para liquidar a un Videla que ya no es joven y es conocido por todos. Y, por último, una anciana –la niña de la primera historia– juega una partida de cartas con su nieto, que ha ido a visitarla a la residencia donde pasa sus días, y entre jugada y jugada le cuenta lo que le sucedió a su hijo, el padre del chico, en lo que resulta una nueva confesión. Tres historias y tres tiempos que se entretejen para forjar una única historia. Tres historias que hablan de dolor, culpa y confesiones.Una novela sobrecogedora y deslumbrante, construida con una brillantísima arquitectura que le permite al autor penetrar hasta la médula de las historias –de la historia– que nos relata.Brutal and overwhelming, Confession wrestles with the legacy of Argentina’s past and the passions of one young girl.There are mysteries in the world of man, just as there are in the Kingdom of God, and that they too, albeit quite differently, are unfathomable.When Mirta López looks out the dining room window, she sees a slim, self-possessed older boy on his way back from school. It’s 1941 in provincial Argentina, and the sight of the Videla’s eldest son has awakened in her the first uncertain, unnerving vibrations of desire. Naturally, she confesses. But she cannot stop herself. Thirty years later, Videla is a general, leading the ruling military junta, and a cell of young revolutionaries plot an ingenious attack on him, and the regime. Writing from the present into the past, Martín Kohan maps the contours of Argentina’s 20th Century, but finds his center in one woman—devout, headstrong, lit up with ideas of right and wrong—not the grand historical figures of her lifetime’s omnipresent, brutalizing history. “There is an art to keeping lives constant, not allowing them to be altered by facts that are merely external.” And there is great beauty in Confession , its decades and landscapes, and the legacy of love and guilt playing out in one family and against the background of dictatorship’s traumas.

Read more less

Brutal and overwhelming, Confession wrestles with the legacy of Argentina’s past and the passions of one young girl.When Mirta López looks out the dining room window, she sees a slim, self-possessed older boy on his way back from school. It’s 1941 in provincial Argentina, and the sight has awakened in her the first uncertain, unnerving vibrations of desire. Naturally, she confesses. But she cannot stop herself.Over thirty years later, in 1977, that same young man is a general, leading the ruling military junta of a country, and a cell of young revolutionaries plot an audacious attack on him, and the regime.Writing from the present into the past, Martín Kohan maps the contours of Argentina’s 20th century, but finds his centre in one woman – devout, headstrong, lit up with ideas of right and wrong – not the grand historical figures of her lifetime’s omnipresent, brutalizing history. And yet, there is great beauty in Confession , its decades and landscapes, and the legacy of love and guilt, pieties religious and civic, that play out in one family and against the background of dictatorship’s traumas.

Read more less

Short stories of subtle menace and Lydia Davis-esque humor.On the eve of an important battle, a colonel is visited in his tent by an indigenous woman with a message to pass on. A man sets about renovating the house of his childhood, and starts to feel that he might be rebuilding his own life in the process. At a private clinic to treat the morbidly obese, a caregiver has issues of her own…These are stories of immigration, marginality, history, intimacy and obsession. They each present their own distinctive view of the world through the lives of their respective characters – who are as dissimilar as they are complex – and the profound transformations they undergo. As reflections on the uncontrollable nature of life, as depictions of how even the most innocent detail can become a threat, these stories do not offer neat endings but rather remain open to the reader’s sense of inquisitiveness.Southerly is a perfect introduction to what has been called ‘the Consiglian logic of story-telling’ (Cabezón Cámara), in which events don’t always occur sequentially, and where the reader quickly learns to tiptoe between the tiniest of details, as if walking through a minefield.

Read more less

¿Cómo mantener una amistad intacta cuando el Alzheimer se va llevando consigo las bases del lenguaje, la memoria y las experiencias compartidas?La narradora visita casi diariamente a ML., con quien compartió una estrecha amistad y ahora padece mal de Alzheimer. A partir de esos encuentros y los fragmentos de memoria de ML. va construyendo un relato poderosamente conmovedor sobre la desarticulación de una mente que progresivamente va borrando todo de una manera peculiar.Un intento, a través de la escritura, de “hacer durar una relación que continúa pese a la ruina, que subsiste aunque apenas queden palabras”. “¿Cómo dice yo el que no recuerda…?”, se pregunta la narradora frente a esa mujer que le muestra la casa como si la visitara por primera vez o que es incapaz de decir que ha sufrido un mareo, pero puede traducir al inglés perfectamente un mensaje donde se dice que ella ha sufrido un mareo.Pasajes de un pasado y un presente compartidos que se transforman en ficción frente a un olvido que no puede contradecirlos. Un libro que opone al derrumbe una prosa precisa y vital y la sensibilidad única de una de las mejores escritoras latinoamericanas.In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too—M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend.This loss holds Molloy’s sense of herself too—the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend’s memory does. But the writer remains: 'I’m not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there’s nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too—M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend. This loss holds Molloy’s sense of herself too—the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend’s memory does. But the writer remains: 'I’m not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there’s nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'

Read more less

El Caribe es un ombligo, profundo, infinito.... susurro. Me aprietan unos músculos firmes, me hace cosquillas la brisa de un aliento fresco. Tiembla San Andrés extasiada. Y tiemblo yo.A mil doscientas millas de tierra firme, resistencia raizal, turistas descuidados, y una historia embarrada sobre la conquista convergen para Victoria, quien vuelve a su hogar desde la Ciudad de México lista para descifrarse a sí misma y al lugar de donde viene.Regresar a san Andrés hace que Victoria Baruq cuestione su relación con la isla. Una foto inquietante de sus tatarabuelos y el raro encuentro con Maa Josephine, una anciana raizal a quien conoce frente a la First Baptiste Church, son algunos de los detonantes que empiezan a revelar detalles de sus orígenes. Su pasado no solo la pone en contacto con la desconocida historia de la isla, sino también con los movimientos sociales que, entre zouk y calipso, celebran la identidad raizal, hacen thinking rundowns, resisten.Esta obra fue ganadora del Premio de Novela Elisa Mújica 2018 (Colombia).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.

Read more less

Women's Prize for Fiction 2023 FinalistThe coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results."Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment." Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Read more less

Un juego intertextual que atraviesa la Ciudad de México con el espíritu de Juan Rulfo y Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.José Federico Burgos es un pintor frustrado devenido falsificador, atrapado en un esplendor surrealista y algo alarmante que involucra una obra maestra flamenca, un vagabundo pícaro y dos hermanos mellizos tan intimidantes como ingeniosos. Él bebe demasiado alcohol, deambula por la zona y, cada día que pasa sin lograr copiar la pintura, se acerca un poco más hacia lo que realmente sucede tras los altos muros del jardín.En homenaje a grandes como Juan Rulfo y Luis Barragán, Puertas demasiado pequeñas de Ave Barrera recorre la Guadalajara de fines del siglo XX con la exuberancia y excentricidad de una novela picaresca del siglo XVIII. Una travesura magnífica y lúdica que se adentra en asuntos como la identidad, el arte y la amistad; un retrato audaz, divertido e íntimo del México contemporáneo digno de El Bosco. The Spanish language edition of The Forgery_. A failing artist turned forger, 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._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.

Read more less

An energizing real-time journey through the translation of Never Did the Fire and the process of literary translation.In Catching Fire , the translation of Diamela Eltit's Never Did the Fire unfolds in real time as a conversation between works of art, illuminating both in the process. The problems and pleasures of conveying literature into another language—what happens when you meet a pun? a double entendre?—are met by translator Daniel Hahn's humor, deftness, and deep appreciation for what sets Eltit's work apart, and his evolving understanding of what this particular novel is trying to do.

Read more less

“Queer writing at its most exhilarating.” **—Times Literary Supplement **The slums of Buenos Aires, the government, the mafia, the Virgin Mary, corrupt police, sex workers, thieves, drug dealers, and debauchery all combine in this sweeping novel deemed a ‘revelation for contemporary literature’ and ‘pure dynamite’ (Andrés Neuman, author of Traveller of the Century & Talking to Ourselves ).When the Virgin Mary appears to Cleopatra, she renounces sex work and takes charge of the shantytown she lives in, transforming it into a tiny utopia. Ambitious journalist Quity knows she’s found the story of the year when she hears about it, but her life is changed forever once she finds herself irrevocably seduced by the captivating subject of her article. Densely-packed, fast-paced prose, weaving slang and classical references, Slum Virgin refuses to whitewash the reality of the poor and downtrodden, and jumps deftly from tragedy to comedy in a way that has the reader laughing out loud.

Read more less

In a poverty-stricken neighbourhood wedged between the city and the sea, a father and son struggle to keep their heads above water. Rather than being discouraged by their difficulties and hardship, their response is to come up with increasingly bizarre and imaginative plans in order to get by. Even when a horrifying, macabre event rocks the neighborhood and the locals start to flee, father and son decide to stay put. What matters is staying together.This is a bold, poignant text that juxtaposes a very tender father-son relationship with the son's sexual liberation and a brutal depiction of homophobic violence. Giuseppe Caputo uses delicate – yet electrifying – lyricism and imagery to weave a tale that balances desire, violence, discrimination, love, eroticism and defiance, while evoking with surreal humor the social marginalization of the protagonists as they struggle to keep afloat in a society where there are no safety nets.Like a brightly-lit theme park with its house of horrors, reminiscent in parts of James Baldwin’s Another Country or Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex trilogy, An Orphan World defies the reader to look away, and the reward is an exhilarating carnival ride filled with beauty, compassion and loss.

Read more less

A warm, witty, passionate cry for living, vital, indigenous languages and the people who speak them. Despite the more than 200 Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, including 63 that are officially recognized and celebrated by the Mexican government, linguistic diversity is and has been under attack in a larger culture that says bilingual is good when it means Spanish and English, but bad when it means Nahuatl and Spanish. Yasnaya Aguilar, a linguist and native Mixe speaker, asks what is lost, for everyone, when the contradictions inherent in Mexico's relationship with its many Indigenous languages mean official protection and actual contempt at worst, and ignorance at best.What does it mean to have a prize for Indigenous literature when different Indigenous languages are as far from each other as they are from Japanese? What impact does considering Tzotzil cultural heritage have on our idea of it, when it is still being used, and refreshed, and changed (like every other language) t

Read more less

After a loss, a year in the country: four seasons to transform a garden and a self. 'In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible,' our narrator tells us. In this remote house and garden, time is almost palpable; it goes by without haste and brings into sharp relief even the tiniest details: insects, the sound of the rain, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth. Past and present are equally weighted and visible here, revealing themselves slowly with every season and turn of the spade.So a year unfolds. A garden takes shape as his connection deepens to this place, becoming a shelter from everyone and everything, perhaps even from himself. We see the ants devouring the chard, we hear the tales his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie, and we learn about his great love, Ciro. The humid sheets in the country, the carefully renovated apartment in the city and the painful, inexplicable break-

Read more less

A fractured account of family abuse, secrets, and the cost of pursuing the truth. In the most private spaces, the most intimate betrayals occur. Belén López Peiró places us squarely in the tenderest of timesyoung teenagehood, in a home about to be ruptured by sexual assault. In this home, for this young woman, your assailant is your uncle, and also a police commissioner. The people who shelter you will reject you: your mother is his sister-in-law, your beloved aunt his wife and your cousin and friend his daughter. And the truth of what happened will depend entirely on you.Why Did You Come Back Every Summer is a document of uncertainty, self-doubt, and the appearance of progress when there is none. A chorus of voices interrupt and overtake each other; interviews and reports are filed. The truth will be heard but how and by whom? Loyalties will shift and slip. And certain questions have no easy answers. What do you owe to your family? What do they owe you? How far will you go to get yo

Read more less

Náufragos, origami, posesión y ciencia: estos cuentos encarnan el punto de encuentro entre los horrores contemporáneos y los terrores antiguos.Seis relatos de una belleza oscura que laten con temáticas perturbadoras: la legitimidad de la venganza, el incesto como medio de supervivencia, brujería indígena versus tradición japonesa, el cuerpo como la víctima fatal que habitamos. Los cuentos de Rivero perforan al lector como una herida, ofreciendo también posibilidades de amor, justicia y esperanza. Narrados con un lirismo frágil y feroz, los cuentos de Tierra fresca de su tumba punzan los abismos del alma humana, y a la vez reforman los límites del gótico para incorporar ritos precolombinos, leyendas, ciencia ficción y erotismo.Shipwrecks, dive bars, possession, and science—this is where contemporary horrors and ancient terrors meet.In Fresh Dirt from the Grave , a hillside is “an emerald saddle teeming with evil and beauty.” It is this collision of harshness and tenderness that animates Giovanna Rivero’s short stories, where no degree of darkness (buried bodies, lost children, wild paroxysms of violence) can take away from the gentleness she shows all violated creatures. A mad aunt haunts her family, two Bolivian children are left on the outskirts of a Metis reservation outside Winnipeg, a widow teaches origami in a women’s prison and murders, housefires, and poisonings abound, but so does the persistent bravery of people trying to forge ahead in the face of the world. They are offered cruelty, often, indifference at best, and yet they keep going. Rivero has reworked the boundaries of the gothic to engage with pre-Columbian ritual, folk tales, sci-fi and eroticism, and found in the wound their humanity and the possibility of hope.

Read more less

In seven interconnected short stories, the Guatemalan countryside is ever-present: a place of timeless peace, and the site of sudden violence. Don Henrik, a good man struck time and again by misfortune, confronts the crude realities of farming life, family obligation, and the intrusions of merciless entrepreneurs, hitmen, drug dealers, and fallen angels, all wanting their piece of the pie. Told with precision and a stark beauty, Trout, Belly Up is a beguiling, disturbing ensemble of moments set in the heart of a rural landscape in a country where brutality is never far from the surface.

Read more less

A mother and son inhabit an isolated and increasingly dangerous private world.The third and final installment of Ariana Harwicz's "Involuntary Trilogy" finds us on familiar, disquieting ground. Under the spell of a mother’s madness, the French countryside transforms into a dreamscape of interconnected imagery: animals, desire, the functions of the body. Most troublingly: the comfort of a teenage son. Scorning the bourgeois mores and conventionality of their small town, she withdraws him from school and the two embark on ever more antisocial and dangerous behavior. Harwicz is at her best here, building an interior world so robust, and so grotesque, that it eclipses our shared reality. Savage, and savagely funny, she leaves us singed, if not scorched.

Read more less

Literary icon Julia Alvarez, the international bestselling author ofIn the Time of the Butterflies , returns with an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling that will be an instant classic.Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart ofThe Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn't want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma's characters unspool t

Read more less

‘This is an impressive book. In writing it the author demonstrates great talent, as well as great courage.’
 —Mario Vargas LlosaIf I succeed in understanding who he was before I was born, perhaps I will be able to understand who I am now that he is dead…In this sprawling family saga stretching across Latin America, a son embarks on a journey to understand his complex relationship with his father and how it shaped the man he is today. Recalling Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits , the renowned journalist and writer Renato Cisneros probes deep into his own family history to try to come to terms with his father, General Luis Federico ‘The Gaucho’ Cisneros, a leading, controversial figure in the oppressive military regime that held power in Peru during the 1970s and 1980s, a tortuous period marked by state-sanctioned terrorism and the rise of the Shining Path.Selling over 35,000 copies in Peru alone, The Distance Between Us is at once excruciating in its honesty and deeply moving in its universal relevance. Selected for a slew of international prizes, it is now available in English for the first time.

Read more less

El Monte Everest, con toda su relevancia para la realeza, los exploradores, los imperialistas. Y dos sherpas, posados en un acantilado, esperando que el hombre de la cornisa de abajo se mueva.Un inglés cae de un acantilado en Nepal, y yace inerte en la cornisa. Dos sherpas se arrodillan en el borde del abismo, permanecen allí, intercambian algunas palabras a la espera de que el hombre tome la decisión de moverse, de descender. En esos minutos, el mundo se abre para Kathmandu: un pueblo soleado en otro continente, las páginas de Julio César. Montañismo, colonialismo, compromisos y obligaciones; en la fluida prosa de Sebastián Martínez Daniell, cada respiro es cristalino, y brinda una perspectiva desde la que se puede ver la inmensidad del mundo. An Englishman has fallen from a cliffside in Nepal, and lies inert on a ledge below. Two sherpas kneel at the edge, stand, exchange the odd word, waiting for him to move, to make a decision, to descend. In those minutes, the world opens up to Kathmandu, a sun-bleached beach town on another continent, and the pages of Julius Caesar. Mountaineering, colonialism, obligation—in Sebastián Martinez Daniell's effortless prose each breath is crystalline, and the whole world is visible from here.Mount Everest, and all it means to royalty, explorers, imperialists, and two sherpas, perched on a cliffside, waiting for a man on the ledge below to move.A British climber has fallen from a cliffside in Nepal, and lies inert on a ledge below. Two sherpas kneel at the edge, stand, exchange the odd word, waiting for him to move, to make a decision, to descend. In those minutes, the world opens up to Kathmandu, a sun-bleached beach town on another continent, and the pages of Julius Caesar. Mountaineering, colonialism, obligation—in Sebastián Martínez Daniell's effortless prose each breath is crystalline, and the whole world is visible from here.

Read more less

Mount Everest, and all it means to royalty, explorers, imperialists, and two sherpas, perched on a cliffside, waiting for a man on the ledge below to move.A British climber has fallen from a cliffside in Nepal, and lies inert on a ledge below. Two sherpas kneel at the edge, stand, exchange the odd word, waiting for him to move, to make a decision, to descend. In those minutes, the world opens up to Kathmandu, a sun-bleached beach town on another continent, and the pages of Julius Caesar. Mountaineering, colonialism, obligation—in Sebastián Martínez Daniell's effortless prose each breath is crystalline, and the whole world is visible from here.

Read more less

How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too—M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend. This loss holds Molloy’s sense of herself too—the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend’s memory does. But the writer remains: 'I’m not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there’s nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'

Read more less

The history of Peru unfolds in the lives of the descendants of seven children fathered by a Catholic priest and his longtime secret lover.Renato Cisneros's great-great-grandmother Nicolasa bore seven children by her long-term secret love, who was also her priest, raising them alone in nineteenth century Peru. More than a century later, Renato, the descendent of that clandestine affair, struggles to wring information about his origins out of recalcitrant relatives, whose foibles match the adventures and dalliances of their ancestors. As buried secrets are brought into the light, the story of Nicolasa's progeny unfolds, bound up with key moments in the development of the Republic of Peru since its independence.

Read more less

Two young men, Pájaro Tamai and Marciano Miranda, are dying in a deserted amusement park. The story begins almost at its end, just after the two main characters have faced off in a knife fight: the culmination of a rivalry that has pitted them against one another since childhood. The present in Brickmakers is a state of impending death, at moments marked by dream-like visions: Marciano is visited by the ghost of his father, who was murdered when he was a teenager, a father he had sworn to avenge, in a promise he could not keep. Pájaro is also visited, in a recurring nightmare, by his abusive father who disappeared years earlier.Narrated with fury and passion, reminiscent of William Faulkner or Katherine Anne Porter, Brickmakers is a rural tragedy in the great American tradition, a story of love, honour and violence where everything is at stake. Reprising the powerful imagery and the filmic landscape of The Wind That Lays Waste, and the threatening atmosphere of Dead Girls, Brickmakers is yet another proof of Almada’s extraordinary talent.

Read more less

Sexo, mentiras e historia científica convergen en La Habana en el año 1993."Era como si hubiéramos alcanzado el punto crítico mínimo de una curva matemática. ¿Tiene presente una parábola? El cero de abajo, el hueco, el abismo. Hasta ahí llegamos."Corre el año 1993. Cuba está en lo más álgido del Período Especial, un profunda crisis económica tras el colapso del bloque soviético.Para Julia, una profesora de matemática que detesta enseñar, La Habana está en su año cero: el punto más bajo, camino a ninguna parte. Desesperada por tomar las riendas de su vida, Julia se une a Euclides, su colega y ex amante, para emprender la búsqueda del documento que compruebe que el teléfono fue inventado por Antonio Meucci, en La Habana. Creen que esta es la respuesta para proteger su reputación y darle a Cuba un nuevo propósito.A partir de este punto cero, Julia da inicio a una investigación que la acercará a dos hombres que prometen guiarla hasta el documento, y que la verá involucrada en un enredado misterio de pasión, legados familiares y las complejidades de cómo la gente encuentra maneras de sobrevivir en un país que vive la más terrible de sus crisis. "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, Havana is at Year Zero: the lowest possible point, going nowhere. Desperate to seize control of her life, Julia teams up with her colleague and former lover, Euclid, to seek out a document that proves the telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci in Havana, convinced it is the answer to secure their reputations and give Cuba a purpose once more.From this point zero, Julia sets out on an investigation to befriend two men who could help lead to the document’s whereabouts, and must pick apart a tangled mystery of sex, family legacies and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.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.

Read more less

The memories we return to most frequently are the most inaccurate, the least faithful to reality...This is the tragic realisation made by the narrator of Ramifications as he tries to make sense of the defining event of his childhood: the disappearance of his mother to join the Zapatista uprising that shook Mexico in 1994. Left behind with an emotionally distant father who is singularly unqualified to raise him, and an older sister who only wants to get on with being a teenager, he takes refuge in strange rituals that isolate him from his peers: favouring the left-hand side of his body, trying to tear leaves into perfect halves, obsessively shaping origami figures. Now, two decades older and withdrawn from the world, he folds and unfolds these memories, searching the creases for the truth of what happened to his mother, unaware that he is on the verge of a discovery that will destroy everything he believed he knew about his family.Award-winning Mexican author Daniel Saldaña París masterfully evokes a child’s attempts to interpret events beyond his understanding. Less a Bildungs-roman than a tale of arrested development, this story of a boy growing up in the aptly-named Educación neighbourhood of Mexico City is a rich and moving portrait of a life thwarted by machismo and secrecy.

Read more less

Leni crossed her arms, said nothing, and watched the fight unfold. She was like a bored onlooker at a boxing trial, wasting no energy on the undercard, saving her passion for the moment when the real champions would step into the ring. And yet, at some point, she began to cry. Just tears, without any sound. Water falling from her eyes as water was falling from the sky. Rain disappearing into rain.The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is an evangelist preaching the word of God across northern Argentina with Leni, his teenage daughter, in tow. When their car breaks down, fate leads them to the workshop of an ageing mechanic, Gringo Brauer, and his assistant, a boy called Tapioca. Over the course of a long day, curiosity and a sense of new opportunities develop into an unexpected intimacy. Yet this encounter between a man convinced of his righteousness and one mired in cynicism and apathy will become a battle for the very souls of the young pair: the quietly earnest and idealistic mechanic’s assistant, and the restless, sceptical preacher’s daughter. As tensions among the four ebb and flow, beliefs are questioned and allegiances tested, until finally the growing storm breaks over the plains.Selva Almada’s exquisitely crafted debut, with its limpid and confident prose, is profound and poetic, a near-tangible experience of the landscape amid the hot winds, wrecked cars, sweat-stained shirts and damaged lives, told with the cinematic precision of a static road movie, like a Paris, Texas of the south. With echoes of Carson McCullers, The Wind That Lays Waste is a contemplative and powerfully distinctive novel that marks the arrival in English of an author whose talent and poise are undeniable.

Read more less

From the acclaimed author ofFish Soup, a wickedly self-aware novel of family, memory, and possibility just this side of the uncanny.A tolerable, ordinary life: an adequate, if boring, freelance job; reliably irritating video calls with your sister; half-hearted plans for the future (a writing residency, a child); and, in the middle of your half-furnished apartment, an enormous crate. Unopened, delivered days ago, and getting in the way.InThe Delivery , what’s inside is your estranged mother, and her arrival brings to a head the tentative motions you’ve made to examine the past and the subtle fissures in the life you’ve built. Semi-ordinary happenings take on an otherworldly cast when you look at them sideways, but nothing is stranger, in this place far from home, than the tenuous bonds of family that hold us together, or don’t.

Read more less

Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil.In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It’s important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it’s a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness.

Read more less

The weird, fetid, familiar discomfort of family is front and centre in these short stories of all the ways we remain a mystery to each other.The mysteries of kinship (families born into and families made) take disconcerting and familiar shapes in these refreshingly frank short stories. A family is haunted by a beast that splatters fruit against its walls every night, another undergoes a near-collision with a bus on the way home from the beach. Mothers are cold, fathers are absent—we know these moments in the abstract, but Adaui makes each as uncanny as our own lives: close but not yet understood.

Read more less

Shipwrecks, dive bars, possession, and science—this is where contemporary horrors and ancient terrors meet.In Fresh Dirt from the Grave , a hillside is “an emerald saddle teeming with evil and beauty.” It is this collision of harshness and tenderness that animates Giovanna Rivero’s short stories, where no degree of darkness (buried bodies, lost children, wild paroxysms of violence) can take away from the gentleness she shows all violated creatures. A mad aunt haunts her family, two Bolivian children are left on the outskirts of a Metis reservation outside Winnipeg, a widow teaches origami in a women’s prison and murders, housefires, and poisonings abound, but so does the persistent bravery of people trying to forge ahead in the face of the world. They are offered cruelty, often, indifference at best, and yet they keep going. Rivero has reworked the boundaries of the gothic to engage with pre-Columbian ritual, folk tales, sci-fi and eroticism, and found in the wound their humanity and the possibility of hope.

Read more less

In a rundown apartment building, in an unnamed city in Uruguay, a father and daughter close themselves off from the world."The world is this house," says Clara, and the rooftop becomes their last recess of freedom. A pet canary is their only witness. As Clara’s connection to the outside is stripped away—the neighbor who stops coming by, the lover whose existence is only known by a pregnancy—desperation and paranoia take hold. It's a stifling embrace, and we are there with her, our narrator, dreading what we know the future holds.

Read more less

What happens when two revolutionaries are left with nothing to believe in, not even each other?Never Did the Fire unfolds in the humdrum of everyday working class existence, making the afterlife of an agitator that of anyone living next door. For one old couple, brought together years ago in an underground cell, the revolution has ended in a small apartment, a grinding job caring for the bodies of the unwell well-to-do, and all the aches and pains that go with a long life and a long marriage. Untethered from the political action that defined them, and mourning the loss of their child, their bonds dissolve, but the consequences of their former life, and their dependence on each other, won't let them go.A literary icon in Chile and a major figure in the anti-Pinochet resistance, Diamela Eltit is at the height of her powers in this novel of breakdowns. Never Did the Fire evokes the charged air of Chile's violent past, and the burdens it carries into the present-day, when the structures we built, and the ones we succumbed to, no longer offer us any comfort or prospect of salvation.

Read more less

Collection, colonialism, translation, and the ephemera that shapes the stories we tell about ourselves.Featuring new original works by: Yásnaya Elena Aguilar, Cristina Rivera Garza, Joseph Zárate, Juan Cárdenas, Velia Vidal, Lina Meruane, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Dolores Reyes, Carlos Fonseca, Djamila RibeiroThe Central and South American collection at the British Museum collections contains approximately 62,000 objects, spanning 10,000 years of human history. The vast majority cannot be displayed, and those objects are the subject of Untold Microcosms , a collection of ten stories from ten Latin American writers, and inspired by the narratives about our past that we create through museums, in spite of their gaps and disarticulations.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

This novel focuses on a group of characters who are all in different ways endeavouring to take control of their fate. Their desire to lead a genuine existence forces them to confront difficult decisions, and to break out of comfortable routines.Karl and Marina have been together for ten years and have a young son, Simón. Karl is a German-born oboist at Argentina’s national orchestra, and Marina is a meteorologist. On a field trip, she meets fellow researcher Zárate, and what might have been just a fling starts to erode the foundations of her marriage. Then there is Amer, a dynamic and successful taxidermist. At a group therapy session for smokers, Amer falls for the younger Clara. While the relationship between Karl and Marina disintegrates, the love story between Amer and Clara is just beginning – or is it already at an end? One of Argentina’s leading contemporary writers, Jorge Consiglio portrays the inner worlds of these characters through the minute details of their everyday lives, laying bare their strivings and their frustrations with a wry gaze, and seeking in this close-up texture a deeper truth.

Read more less