An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain

Cosmos Latinos
An Anthology of Early Classics of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain
Andrea L. Bell & Yolanda Molina-Gavilán - Editors

Wesleyan University Press
Distributed byUniversity Press of New England
9780819566348
Paper Back 368 Pages
Price :$24.95

Opening a window onto a fascinating new world for English-speaking readers, this anthology offers popular and influential stories from over ten countries, chronologically ranging from 1862 to the present. Latin American and Spanish science fiction shares many thematic and stylistic elements with anglophone science fiction, but there are important differences: many downplay scientific plausibility, and others show the influence of the region’s celebrated literary fantastic. In the 27 stories included in this anthology, a 16th-century conquistador is re-envisioned as a cosmonaut, Mexican factory workers receive pleasure-giving bio-implants, and warring bands of terrorists travel through time attempting to reverse the outcome of historical events.
The introduction examines the ways the genre has developed in Latin America and Spain since the 1700s and studies science fiction as a means of defamiliarizing, and then critiquing, regional culture, history and politics—especially in times of censorship and political repression. The volume also includes a brief introduction to each story and its author, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works. Cosmos Latinos is a critical contribution to Latin American, Spanish, popular culture and science fiction studies and will be stimulating reading for anyone who likes a good story.
ANDREA L. BELL is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Hamline University in Minnesota.
YOLANDA MOLINA-GAVILÀN is Associate Professor of Spanish at Eckerd College in Florida and the translator of Rosa Montero’s The Delta Function (1992).

Encyclopedia of African Literature

Encyclopedia of African Literature
Edited by Simon Gikandi

Routledge
ISBN: 9780415549622
May 2009
Paperback 648 Pages
Price: $59.95

The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this easy-to-use book contains over 600 alphabetically arranged entries that cover major and less established African authors and texts, criticism and theory, and African Literature’s development as a field of scholarship.
Now available in paperback, this volume is an essential resource for students of African literature and a useful tool for those considering African culture across the fields of Literary Studies, African Studies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies.

Niki - The Story of a Dog by Tibor Déry

Niki - The Story of a Dog
Tibor Déry
Introduction by George Szirtes
Translated from the Hungarian by Edward Hyams

New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590173183
July 2009
Paperback 144 pages
Price: $14.95

"The Dog adopted the Ancsas in the spring of '48": so the story begins. The Ancsas are a middle-aged couple living on the outskirts of Budapest in a ruinous Hungary that is just beginning to wake up from the nightmare of World War II. The new Communist government promises to set things straight, and Mr. Ancsa, an engineer, is as eager to get to work building the future as he is to forget the past. The last thing he has time for is a little mongrel bitch, pregnant with her first litter. But Niki knows better, and before long she is part of the Ancsa household. The Ancsas even take her along with them when Mr. Ancsa's new job requires a move to an apartment in the city.
Then Mr. Ancsa is swept up in a political crackdown—disappearing without a trace. For five years he does not return, five years of absence, silence, fear, and the constant struggle to survive—five years during which Mrs. Ancsa and Niki have only each other.
The story of Niki, an ordinary dog, and the Ancsas, a no less ordinary couple, is an extraordinarily touching, utterly unsentimental, parable about caring, kindness, and the endurance of love.
Tibor Déry (1894-1977) was born in Budapest into a prosperous family of partly Jewish descent. In 1919, he joined the Communist Party and served in the ill-fated revolutionary government of Béla Kun, which collapsed before the end of the year. For much of the next fifteen years he lived in exile, returning to Hungary for good in 1935. Though initially well-regarded by Hungary's post- World War II Communist government, by 1953 Déry had been expelled from the party for his criticism of its increasingly repressive policies. He then supported Imre Nagy's reformist government and, after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 uprising, was sentenced to nine years in prisonAmong Déry's major works are Love and Other Stories, the novel The Unfinished Sentence, and an autobiography, No Verdict.

Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Memories of the Future
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Joanne Turnbull

New York Review of Books
ISBN:9781590173190
Oct 6, 2009
Paperback 256 pages
Price: $15.95

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn't join it as there's no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), the Ukrainian-born son of Catholic Poles, studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. After graduation and two summers spent exploring Europe, he was obliged to clerk for an attorney. A sinecure, the job allowed him to devote the bulk of his time to the study of literature and his own writing. In 1920, after a brief stint in the Red Army, Krzhizhanovsky began lecturing intensively in Kiev on the theater and music. The lectures continued in Moscow, where he moved in 1922, by then well known in literary circles. Lodged in a cell-like room on the Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky wrote steadily for close to two decades. His philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light. Three separate efforts to print different collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could these surreal fictions begin to be published. Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. "I am interested," he said, "not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life."

The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

The Informers
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9780747596516
Paperback 352 pages
Price : £7.99

When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father’s anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century later.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne between 1996 and 1998, and now lives in Barcelona. His stories have appeared in anthologies in Germany, France, Spain, and Colombia, and he has translated works by E.M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. His essays, reviews and reportage have appeared in various magazines and literary supplements. He was recently nominated as one of the Bogota 39, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation.

Knowledge of Hell by António Lobo

Knowledge of Hell
António Lobo Antunes
Translator: Clifford E. Landers

Dalkey Archive
ISBN :9781564784360
Paper Back 312 Pages
Price:$13.95

Like his creator, the narrator of this novel is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a veteran of the despised 1970s colonial war waged by Portugal against Angola, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins Antunes on a journey both real and phantasmagorical as he travels by car from a vacation in the Algarve back to his hated work as a psychiatrist at a Lisbon mental institution. In the course of one long day and evening, he carries on an imaginary conversation with his daughter Joanna, observes with surreal vision the bleak countryside of his nation, recalls the horrors of his involuntary role in the suppression of Angolan independence, and curses the charlatanism of contemporary psychiatric “advances” that destroy rather than heal.

António Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1942. He began writing as a child, but at his father’s wishes, went to medical school instead of pursuing a career in writing. After completing his studies, Antunes was sent to Angola with the Portuguese Army. It was in a military hospital in Angola that Antunes first became interested in many of the subjects of his novels. Antunes lives in Lisbon, where he continues to write and practice psychiatry.
Clifford E. Landers has translated fifteen novels from Brazilian Portuguese, and was awarded both the Mario Ferreira Award in 1999 from ATA’s Portuguese Language Division, as well as a Prose Translation grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2004.

Son of Man by Augusto Roa Bastos

Son of Man
Augusto Roa Bastos
Translated by Rachel Caffyn
Jean Franco - Afterword

Monthly Review Press in 1988
ISBN :9780853457336
Paperback 279 pages
Not Available in the market now..but for an information..!!

Roa Bastos’s novel Hijo de hombre (1960; Son of Man) was an overwhelming critical and popular success. It recreates Paraguay’s history from the dictatorship of José Gaspar de Francia early in the 19th century through the Chaco War. By carefully juxtaposing alternate narrative voices, Roa Bastos creates a tension that signals the moral and political situations in Paraguay’s history .

To say that Roa Bastos is the paradigm of the Latin American writer in exile would be no exaggeration. After spending 25 years in Buenos Aires following an abortive conspiracy in the 1940s to overthrow a dictatorship, Roa accepted a teaching position at the Universite de Toulouse-Le Mirail, from which he is now retired. In the mid-1980s, he accepted an offer of Spanish citizenship, resigned to his never again living in his native country. Roa Bastos's complex fiction is the attempt to record the "inner" history of Paraguay and to record the many silenced voices: those of the indigenous population (including those who speak the Guarani language, which dominates in Paraguay's bilingual and bicultural society); the original independence fighters and their revolutionary offspring; the marginalized artist who is forced to live, if not an actual exile, an interior exile; and those decent men and women whose very decency exposes them to exploitation and oppression. Roa Bastos's novel Son of Man is his effort to create such an inner history. Passages in an almost biblical style create a panoramic transition between vignettes in which Christ figures represent the injustices of Paraguayan society and its victims' sacrifices. I, the Supreme (1974) is the first-person narrative of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, the Enlightenment-inspired Paraguayan strongman of the mid-1800s who sought to create an autochthonous utopia in the Paraguayan heartland. Francia fought against the overwhelming odds of international forces desiring to thwart Paraguay's political independence and to appropriate its natural resources, and Roa Bastos portrays him as a tragic figure. In the novel, he is caught between, on the one hand, the historical necessities of brutal dictatorship and the inevitable destiny of the young South American republics, and, on the other, the profoundly seductive chimeras of sociocultural independence.

I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos

I the Supreme
Augusto Roa Bastos
Translator: Helen Lane

Dalkey Archive
ISBN :1-56478-247-6
Paperback 433 Pages
Price:$13.95

Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with fictional portraits of such figures, and no novel of this genre is as universally esteemed as Augusto Roa Bastos's I the Supreme, a book that draws on and reimagines the career of the man who was "elected" Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814.
By turns grotesque, comic, and strangely moving, I the Supreme is a profound meditation on the uses and abuses of power—over men, over events, over language itself.

Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005) is considered one of Parguay's greatest novelists. He is best known for his novel I the Supreme, but he wrotes many books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He spent much of his life outside of his home country, both as a foreign correspondent and in exile for his opposition to the ruling governments of his country.
Helen Lane was the preeminent translator of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian fiction. Among the long list of authors she translated are Augusto Roa Bastos, Jorge Amado, Luisa Valenzuela, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marguerite Duras, Nélinda Piñon, and Curzio Malaparte.

Stories of the Modern South

Stories of the Modern South
Ben Forkner & Patrick S. J. Samway - Editors

ISBN 9780140247053
Paperback 544 pages
Price :$17.00 Sp.Price :$11.00

Rich in irony, sly humor, and vivid, dramatic imagery, the literature of the modern South is a vital amalgam of a once-rural society's storytelling tradition and the painful contradictions and cultural clashes brought about by rapid change. This excellent collection includes works by Truman Capote, James Agee, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Anne Tyler, Reynolds Price, and many others.

For Table of Contents Please Click Here

The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño

The Skating Rink
Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Chris Andrews

New Directions
August 2009 Release
ISBN :978-0-8112-1713-2
Hard Cover 208 Pages
Price: $21.95

Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink oscillates between two poles: a camp ground and a ruined mansion, the Palacio Benvingut. The story, told by three male narrators, revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex-opera singer and a taciturn girl often armed with a knife, turn up as well.A complex book, The Skating Rink’s short chapters are skillfully broken off with questions to maintain the narrative tension: Who was murdered? Who was the murderer? Will the murderer be caught? All of these questions are answered, and yet The Skating Rink is not fundamentally a crime novel, or not exclusively; it’s also about political corruption, sex, the experience of immigration, and frustrated passion. And it’s an atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, its drifters, its businessmen, bureaucrats and social workers.

Hell Has No Limits by José Donoso

Hell Has No Limits

José Donoso

Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine

Green Integer

ISBN: 1-892295-14-8

Paper Back 163 Pages

Price: $10.95

With its stark atmosphere, powerful characterizations, and dazzling alterations of perspective in time and gender, José Donoso's early masterwork, Hell Has No Limits, anticipates the qualities of better-known works of this Chilean magic-realist.Originally published in 1966, this grimly vivid novel evokes the sweetness and despair during one fateful day in the collective existence of Estación El Olivo, a decayed community marked for doom as surely as Donoso's central character, the transvestite dancer/prostitute la Manuela, whose virginal daughter operates the brothel out of which she/he works.La Manuela is menaced both by his would-be protector, the local politician/land baron who wants to raze Estación El Olivo for his expanding vineyards, and by a coldly vengeful trucker, nursing a lifetime of hurts, deprivation, and suppressed sexual ambiguity. The lives of this trio—past and present—are indelibly forged in the novel's stunning climax, which combines a shocking act of violence in the present with a bizarre erotic encounter from decades before.

Author of A House in the Country, The Obscene Bird of Night, Coronation, This Sunday, Curfew, and numerous other works, Donoso is one of the great Latin American “boom” novelists. He was awarded the International Prize of the Americas Awards in 1996, shortly before his death.

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Tower Struck by Lightning by Fernando Arrabal

Tower Struck by Lightning

by Fernando Arrabal

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN-13: 978-0140130218

Paperback: 256 pages

Price: $15.00 Sp.Price: $10.00

Acclaimed Spanish avant-garde playwright Arrabal has delivered himself of a bracingly intelligent, caustically funny first novel. Rebellious, artistic, ex-Jesuit seminarian Elias Tarsis, an Andorran Spaniard, is locked in struggle with Marc Amary, a coldly brilliant Swiss physicist turned financial speculator and Marxist terrorist. The battlefield: the final game of the world chess championship. Ostensibly the antithesis of one another, each protagonist increasingly appears to be the other's doppelganger, as the book progresses with the aid of diagrams and flashbacks of their lives. Master chess player himself, Arrabal uses the final round of the world chess championship to flesh out a personal and political confrontation between Andorran Elias Tarsis and Marc Amary, a Swiss physicist who desires victory for the greater Communist glory of the "Party of the Poor." For his opponent, Amary is an implacable robot who "reeks of assassination," so when the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs is the victim of a sensational kidnapping,Tarsis is convinced that Amary is behind the Paris kidnapping of a top-ranking politburo official and the ensuing demand that the Soviet Union bomb the Saudi Arabian oil fields. This mysteryand the matchare resolved to considerable effect with a surprising twist. Despite a tendency to be overly didactic, this is a stimulating examination of how emotion drives intelligence and how the innocent become pawns in the cycle of evil and human suffering. As the two make their moves on the chessboard (diagrams of which are provided), their lives unfold and the contest becomes ideological.As can be expected from this avant-garde maverick, dogmas cannot be depended on and the ending has an O. Henry-like twist.