Latin-American Literature

Mario Vargas Llosa condenses a lifetime of writing, reading, and thought into an essential manual for aspiring writers. Drawing on the stories and novels of writers from around the globe-Borges, Bierce, Céline, Cortázar, Faulkner, Kafka, Robbe-Grillet-he lays bare the inner workings of fiction, all the while urging young novelists not to lose touch with the elemental urge to create. Conversational, eloquent, and effortlessly erudite, this little book is destined to be read andre-read by young writers, old writers, would-be writers, and all those with a stake in the world of letters.

A masterful new translation of a haunting novel of nineteenth-century Haiti A few years after its liberation from harsh French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of great brutality under the reign of King Henri Christophe, who was born a slave but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. In this unnerving novel from one of Cuba's most celebrated authors, Henri Christophe's oppressive rule is observed through the eyes of the elderly slave Ti Noël, who suffers abuse from masters both white and black. As he ranges across the countrysearching for true liberation, Ti Noël navigates bloody revolutions, maniacal rulers with false visions of grandeur, and the mysterious power of voodoo magic. First published in English translation in 1957,The Kingdom of This World is now widely recognized as a masterpiece of Cuban and Caribbean literature. Pablo Medina's remarkable new translation renders the dreamlike prose of Alejo Carpentier with nuance and felicity while delivering anew a powerful novel about the birth of modern Haiti. Visionary and singularly twisted,The Kingdom of This Worldemerges from the depths of the struggle for a country into a tale of race, erotomania, magic, and madness.

Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind. Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English,Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun." From "Let Me Try Again": He knew we weren't Mexican. He must've remembered his family coming over the border, or the border coming over them, because he drove us to the border and told us next time, rest at least five days, don't trust anyone calling themselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines, Alhambra. He knew we would try again. And again--like everyone does. Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

First published in 1923, just before César Vallejo left Peru for France, Scales combines prose poems with short stories in a collection that exhibits all the exuberance of the author's early experimentalism. A follow-up to Vallejo's better-known work, Trilce, this radical collection shattered many aesthetic notions prevailing in Latin America and Europe. Intermingling romantic, symbolist, and avant-garde traditions, Scales is a poetic upending of prose narrative that blends Vallejo's intercontinental literary awareness with his commitment to political transformation. Written in part from Trujillo Central Jail, where Vallejo would endure some of the most terrifying moments of his life, Scales is also a testament of anguish and desperation, a series of meditations on justice and freedom, an exploration of the fantastic, and a confrontation with the threat of madness. Edited and translated from the Castilian by the scholar Joseph Mulligan, this first complete English translation, published here in bilingual format and accompanied by extensive archival documentation related to Vallejo's incarceration, this volume gives unprecedented access to one of the most inventive practitioners of Latin American literature in the twentieth century.

The Future Is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction brings together twenty-three Latin American writers who were born between 1970 and 1980. The anthology offers an exciting overview of contemporary Spanish-language literature and introduces a generation of writers who came of age in the time of military dictatorships, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the birth of the Internet, the murders of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and the September 11th attacks in New York City. The anthology features: Oliverio Coelho, Federico Falco, and Samanta Schweblin (Argentina); Giovanna Rivero (Bolivia); Santiago Nazarian (Brazil); Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Antonio Ungar (Colombia); Ena Lucía Portela (Cuba); Lina Meruane, Andrea Jeftanovic, and Alejandro Zambra (Chile); Ronald Flores (Guatemala); Tryno Maldonado and Antonio Ortuño (México); María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra (Nicaragua); Carlos Wynter Melo (Panama); Daniel Alarcón and Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru); Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (Puerto Rico); Ariadna Vásquez (Dominican Republic); Ignacio Alcuri and Inés Bortagaray (Uruguay); and Slavko Zupcic (Venezuela). Diego Trelles Paz was born in Lima, Peru in 1977. He is the author ofHudson el redentor [Hudson the redeemer] and the novelEl círculo de los escritores asesinos [The Circle of Assassin Writers]. Janet Hendrickson's translations have been published in a number of magazines, includingWords Without Borders,n+1 andVirginia Quarterly Review.

Editor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria brings together fifty-three stories that span the history of Latin American literature and represent the most dazzling achievements in the form. In his fascinating introduction, Gonzalez Echevarria traces the evolution of the short story in Latin American literature, explaining why the genre has flourished there with such brilliance, and illuminating the various cultural and literary tensions that resolve themselves in "magical realism." The stories themselves exhibit all the inventiveness,the luxuriousness of language, the wild metaphoric leaps and uncanny conjunctions of the ordinary with the fantastic that have given the Latin American short story its distinctive and unforgettable flavor: From the Joycean subtlety of Machado de Assis's "Midnight Mass," to the brutal parable of Julio Ramon Ribeyro's "Featherless Buzzards," to the startling disorientation of Alejo Carpentier's "Journey Back to the Source," (which is told backwards, because a sorcerer has waved his wand and made time flow in reverse), to the haunting reveries of Maria Luisa Bombal's "The Tree." Readers familiar with only the most popular Latin American writers will be delighted to discover many exciting new voices here.

Large anthology includes work by 58 poets. Extensive, but general, introduction. Poets arranged chronologically from Jos e Mart i to Marjorie Agos in. Volume includes few surprises and relatively few women. Bilingual format.

"This Anthology is so valuable; it lays open the emotions of writers who, in turn, speak for others still shrouded in silence. For women in Latin America, setting down a short story is like screaming out loud; it breaks the rules, violates the code of silence into which we are born. Through these stories, each author selected by Dr. Zapata shouts out defiantly and reveals our experience to the world" -Isabel Allende.

With contributions from Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Kat Francois, Jay T. John, Anthony Joseph, Ishion Hutchinson, Charnell Lucien, Vladimir Lucien, Rachel Manley, Tanya Shirley and Karen McCarthy Woolf. What does it mean to fight for a ‘mother country'that refuses to accept you as one of its own? Britain's First World War poets changed the way we view military conflict and had a deep impact on the national psyche. Yet the stories of the 15,600 volunteers who signed up to the British West Indian Regiment remain largely unknown. Sadly, these citizens of empire were not embraced as compatriots on an equal footing. Instead they faced prejudice, injustice and discrimination while being confined to menial and auxiliary work, regardless of rank or status. As a collaborative project, co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, BBC Contains Strong Language and the British Council, Unwritten Poems invited contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora poets to write into that vexed space, and explore the nature of war and humanity – as it exists now, and at a time when Britain's colonial ambitions were still at a peak.

With this new Latino literary collection Erika M. Martínez has brought together twenty-four engaging narratives written by Dominican women and women of Dominican descent living in the United States. The first volume of its kind, Daring to Write's insightful works offer readers a wide array of content that touches on a range of topics: migration, history, religion, race, class, gender, and sexuality. The result is a moving and imaginative critique of how these factors intersect and affect daily lives. The volume opens with a foreword by Julia Alvarez and includes short stories, novel excerpts, memoirs, and personal essays and features work by established writers such as Angie Cruz and Nelly Rosario, alongside works by emerging writers. Narratives originally written in Spanish appear in English for the first time, translated by Achy Obejas. An important contribution to Latino/a studies, these writings will introduce readers to a new collection of rich literature.