A classic of Mexican modern literature about a haunted village.
As one enters Juan Rulfo’s legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo – lover, overlord, murderer.
Rulfo’s extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.
The book is highly influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless and relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s modal teachings on Zen Buddhism.
Cortázar's employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the "riffing" aesthetic of jazz and New Wave Cinema.
In 1966, Gregory Rabassa won the first National Book Award to recognize the work of a translator, for his English-language edition of Hopscotch. Julio Cortázar was so pleased with Rabassa's translation of Hopscotch that he recommended the translator to Gabriel García Márquez when García Márquez was looking for someone to translate his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude into English. "Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude improved the original," according to García Márquez.
Breve e intensa novela publicada en 1948, este logrado fruto de la denominada "literatura existencial" le dio a su autor un reconocimiento que traspasó las fronteras nacionales. Para quien todavía no la leyó, El túnel es la mejor introducción al universo prodigioso de Ernesto Sábato; para quien la conoce, un clásico de las letras del continente, una historia sobre el drama del hombre arrojado en el sinsentido más doloroso: la conciencia de la nada. El narrador describe una historia de amor y muerte en la que muestra la soledad del individuo contemporáneo. No están ausentes de esta trama policial y de suspenso, la locura y la increíble reflexión del protagonista, el pintor Juan Pablo Castel, debatiéndose por comprender las causas que lo arrastraron a matar a la mujer que amaba, María Iribarne, y que era su única vía de salvación. En este alucinante drama de la vida interior, seres intrincados en la bestial búsqueda de comprensión ceden a la mentira, la hipocresía y los celos desmedidos hasta el crimen más inexplicable. Aventura amorosa, aventura onírica, aventura del ser que dan testimonio de un asesinato, de cierta memoria culpable y de una valiente introspección. Técnicamente perfecta y de lectura apasionante, El túnel excede el negativismo ácido de Sartre y la frenética huida hacia el vacío que plantea El extranjero de Camus, pero tiene de esos dos maestros literarios la impronta genial que hace de la escritura una radiografía del alma atormentada.
Esta es la segunda novela de Ernesto Sabato, que profundiza la senda iniciada por El túnel. Una obra, considerada uno de los mejores libros del siglo, que indaga en las zonas más oscuras del espíritu
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place twenty-seven years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to try and stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.
One of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most intricate and ambitious works, The Autumn of the Patriarch is a brilliant tale of a Caribbean tyrant and the corruption of power.
From charity to deceit, benevolence to violence, fear of God to extreme cruelty, the dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch embodies the best but also the worst of human nature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the renowned master of magical realism, vividly portrays the dying tyrant caught in the prison of his own dictatorship. Employing an innovative, dreamlike style, and overflowing with symbolic descriptions, the novel transports the reader to a world that is at once fanciful and vividly real.
On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit–he has purchased hundreds of women–he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known.
Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to the master’s work. --back cover
Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals andoutlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals withthe problem of redheads. "From the Trade Paperback edition."
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