As Chile descends into chaos, two disparate souls begin "an odd-couple romance, in the tradition of Kiss of the Spider Woman or The Crying Game" ( Kirkus Reviews).It is the spring of 1986, and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is losing his grip on power. In one of Santiago's many poor neighborhoods, a man known as the Queen of the Corner embroiders linens for the wealthy. A hopeless and lonely romantic, he listens to boleros to drown out...

"A bold, beautiful book."—The New York Times"A marvelous chronicle."—Publishers WeeklyPart reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm is the breakout work by Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff. Writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia, Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. In prose that showcases her sharp powers of observation, Cristo...

An interpreter takes a vow of silence in order to re-define the terms on which she lives.Mara is a simultaneous interpreter who moves to a provincial town in Argentina in order to speak as little as possible for a year. Steeled with the ten rules of silence set out in her manual of rhetoric, she takes a job as a guard in the local museum. The advantages of her work are threatened when she’s asked to assist in the re-embalming of the museum’s pride and joy: two hors...

A Rainmaker Translation Grant Winner from the Black Mountain Institute: Senselessness, acclaimed Salvadoran author Horacio Castallanos Moya's astounding debut in English, explores horror with hilarity and electrifying panache.A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimoni...

A cerebral and wildly funny story revolving around the incongruity of a gold Rolex watch spotted on a lowly goatherd’s wristDaily conversations in outdoor cafés with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera’s goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, distress, and incipient madness. The two men’...

A Dream Come True collects the complete stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, presenting his existentialist, complex, and ironic style over the course of his writing career. Onetti was praised by Latin America's greatest authors, and regarded as an inventor of a new form and school of writing.Juan Carlos Onetti's A Dream Come True depicts a sharp, coherent, literary voice, encompassing Onetti's early stages of writing and his later texts. They span from ...

From one of Colombia's leading novelists, a tragicomic story of unrequited love and a view of New York through the wide eyes of an illegal immigrantParadise Travel recounts the adventures of Marlon Cruz, a naïve young man from Medellín, Colombia, who agrees to accompany the beautiful, ambitious woman he loves to New York. On their first night in Queens, Marlon and Reina lose each other, thus initiating Marlon's descent into the underbelly of our country.

Salvadorean society is shocked by the gruesome murder of a young upper-class woman, and no one more so than her best friend Laura. In her first-person solo narration, Laura rattles on and on about her disbelief and horror at the evils all around her—but who’s that in the mirror?Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pul...

"Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring." —Roberto BolañoThis Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing in the drier precincts of postwar Mexico introduces one of Latin America's most admired writers to the English-speaking world.Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist who passes his days in a dull but remunerative job at a ranch near Oaxaca. It is 1945, World War II has just ended, but those bloody events have had ...

New in the New Directions Pearls series: an extremely rich mad scientist attempts to clone a leading genius in a bid to take over the world.César is a translator who’s fallen on very hard times due to the global economic downturn; he is also an author, and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. Even so, César’s bid for world domination...

In English at last, Borges’s erudite and entertaining lectures on English literature from Beowulf to Oscar WildeWriting for Harper’s Magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges:“A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of ‘precursors,’cross-cultural borrow...

A gripping and hilarious 1960s Mexico City noirOnly a couple of days before the state visit of the President of the United States, Filiberto García — an impeccably groomed "gun for hire," ex-Mexican revolutionary, and classic anti-hero — is recruited by the Mexican police to discover how much truth there might be to KGB and FBI reports of a Chinese-Mongolian plot to assassinate the Soviet and American presidents during the unveiling of a statue.García kills...