In this precious poetic autobiography, Gabriella Bianco not only tells the final hour of an existencethat of her son Robert Steve but also the loss of a great love, in a world full of absences. Gabriella Bianco challenges her destiny, inviting us to the caducity of all that surrounds usfeelings, love, life and even the most precious gift, a son. In the loving relation not only with language and poetry, but also with the drama of life, Bianco needs to reveal a secrether sons deathand share ...

From a National Book Award finalist, this hilarious and profound first novel captures the experience of the young American abroad while exploring the possibilities of art and authenticity in our time.Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s “research” becomes a meditati...

It is no common thing to find an artist who, even if he be willing to try, is capable of expressing his aims and ideals with any clearness and moderation. Some people will say that any such capacity is a flaw in the perfect artist, who should find his expression in line and colour, and leave the multitude to grope its way unaided towards comprehension. This attitude is a relic of the days when "l'art pour l'art" was the latest battle cry; when eccentricity of manner and irregularity of lif...

Winner of the Cervantes PrizeCarlos Fuentes, one of the world’s most acclaimed authors, is at the height of his powers in this stunning new novel—a magnificent epic of passion, magic, and desire in modern Mexico, a rich and remarkable tapestry set in a world where free will fights with the wishes of the gods.Josué Nadal has lost more than his innocence: He has been robbed of his life—and his posthumous narration sets the tone for a brilliantly written novel that blends myst...

A Nobel Prize winner's captivating novel of reality, fantasy, and sensualitySet in Lima, Notebooks of Don Rigoberto tells a love story whose participants may be the fictional characters of Don Rigoberto himself. With his signature wit and playfulness, Mario Vargas Llosa masterfully blurs the lines between reality and imagination, crafting a novel that is at once sexy, humorous, thought-provoking, and utterly engrossing.Vargas Llosa, a Nobel laureat...

In this masterly, deeply personal, and provocative book, the internationally renowned Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, whose work has been called “a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen” (Newsweek), steps back to survey the wellsprings of art and ideology, the events that have shaped our time, and his extraordinary life and fiercest passions.Arranged alphabetically from “Amore” to “Zurich,” This I Believe takes us on a marvelous inner journey with a grea...

The celebrated anthropologist and author of The Corn Wolf examines the Colombian culture of plastic surgery and its surprising relationship to violence.Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the audacious and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual's beauty with their often-overlooked...

Roberto and his wife have just dropped off their children at the station and are now alone with each other in their suddenly quiet house. This brief tale, left unfinished, is one of Svevo's most terrifying.Translated from Italian (2012) by Juan LePuenGenre: short storyLength: 5,900 words

A disgruntled portrait artist in 1970s Portugal turn to writing in the Nobel Prize-winning author's debut novel, now available in English translation.Manual of Painting and Calligraphy was José Saramago's first novel. Written eight years before the critically acclaimed Baltasar and Blimunda, it is a story of self-discovery set in Portugal during the last years of Antonio Salazar's dictatorship. It tells the story of a struggling artist who is commi...

A selection of prose by "Portugal's greatest writer of the twentieth century . . . as addictive, and endearing, as Borges and Calvino" ( The Washington Post Book World).Building on the wonderful Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, which was acclaimed by Booklist as "a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century," translator Richard Zenith has now edited and translated selections from Pessoa's prose, offering a seco...

Hypochondria, insomnia, restlessness, and yearning are the lame muses of these brief pages. I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas . . . because many of them wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters. . . . Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having to be, or bumps on the surface of existence . . . ...

Cosmopolitan, vivacious essays in the tradition of Brodsky’s Watermark and Benjamin’s The Arcades Project by a celebrated young Mexican author.Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky’s tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the que...