Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Feature.When Marcelo Rubens Paiva was 11 years old, his father was tortured to death by the Brazilian dictatorship. 25 years later, his mother, Eunice, helped usher into law a way for the families of the regime’s victims to finally have their deaths formally acknowledged, and allow them to seek compensation. In between, the unspooling of Brazilian democracy, and then the terrors and everydayness of life under the dictato...

*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 l...

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 H...

Friendship makes life worth living, and worth ending too.Eufrasia Vela is a caregiver—it’s not just her job. But when she begins working with Doña Carmen, a bedridden elderly woman who spends her days staring out the window at her now-obstructed view of the sea, she confronts the limits to her ability to help. That is, until Doña Carmen makes a big, last request: to transform her caretaking from helping her stay alive to helping her die. A good death has m...

The world is full of stories. Some are as long as lizards, others so short that they never even make it to The End. But the invisible story is unlike any other story because no one has ever read it! It lives hidden in the darkest corner of the library, far from where the famous tales, written in gold letters, shine. One day, a blind reader approaches the story's trembling pages. This reader is unlike any reader the invisible story has ever encountered. And when she runs her fingertips over...

“The most influential Colombian novel before Gabriel García Márquez.”—Times Literary SupplementA new translation of a Latin American classic, José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex follows the young poet Arturo Cova and his lover, Alicia, as they elope from Bogotá and embark on an adventure through Colombia's varied and magical landscapes. When Alicia—pregnant, jealous, and more than a little fed up—disappears, it’s up to Arturo, and his unstoppable eg...

In a small village in the Swiss Alps, in the aftermath of World War II, particle physics and psychiatry grapple with a forever changed world.Nicholas walks the wooded path between the sanitarium where he works and his home, alert to a possible menace lurking in the trees, haunted by the possibility of an evil just out of sight. His days are spent ministering to minds that have been grievously damaged by the years of brutal conflict, violence suffered and violence a...

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...

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 ...

"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 be...

What does Brazilian literature mean to you? Football and favelas, carnival and caipirinhas? Or perhaps, past these clichés, a multifarious literary landscape comes into view?Spanning 150 years of Brazilian history, these stories are a thrilling cross-section of a diverse short story culture. Ranging from luscious avant-garde writing by Clarice Lispector to realist wit by Machado de Assis, The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories takes in wild humour, heartbreaking drama...

Thought-provoking and lyrical, The Notebook records the last year in the life of Jos� Saramago. In these pages, beginning on the eve of the 2008 US presidential election, he evokes life in his beloved city of Lisbon, revisits conversations with friends, and meditates on his favorite authors. Precise observations and moments of arresting significance are rendered with pointillist detail, and together demonstrate an acute understanding of our times. Characteristically critical and u...