In Death as a Side Effect, Ana Maria Shua's brilliantly dark satire transports readers to a dystopic future Argentina where gangs of ad hoc marauders and professional thieves roam the streets while the wealthy purchase security behind fortified concrete walls and the elderly cower in their apartments in fear of being whisked off to state-mandated "convalescent" homes, never to return. Abandoned by his mistress, suffocated by his father, and estranged from his demented mother and ineffectual sister, Ernesto seeks his vanished lover. Hoping to save his dying father from the ministrations of a diabolical health-care system, he discovers that, ultimately, everyone is a patient, and the instruments wielded by the impersonal medical corps cut to the very heart of the social fabric. The world of this novel, with its closed districts, unsafe travel, ubiquitous security cameras, and widespread artificiality and uncertainty, is as familiar as it is strange-and as instructive, in its harrowing way, as it is deeply entertaining. The Spanish edition has been selected by the Congreso de la Lengua Espanola as one of the one hundred best Latin American novels published in the last twenty-five years.

A story of contemporary Chile by one of its most prominent novelists, "An Empty House" depicts the dissolution of an upper-middle-class family against a chilling background of exile, return, and discovery. The stark and moving narrative suggests the enormity of the horrors perpetrated in Chile over the last decades, horrors that resonate through the culture to this day. Cecilia and Manuel accept her father's gift of a house, in hope of repairing their unraveling marriage along with the badly scarred building. Instead, the couple's efforts expose the horrifying truth about the building--and reveal the subtle strands of complicity, responsibility, and indifference that bind them to each other, their country, and its dark past. With its deftly drawn characters, play of ideas, and vivid dialogue, "An Empty House" gives English-speaking readers a memorable portrait of Chile today: honest, brutally realistic, but with a redemptive touch of lyricism and hope.

Dystopian fantasy, political parable, morality tale--however one reads it, this novel is first and foremost pure Ana Maria Shua, a work of fiction like no other and a dark pleasure to read. Shua, an Argentinian writer widely celebrated throughout Latin America, frames her complex drama in deceptively simple, straightforward prose. The story takes place at a fat farm called The Reeds, a nightmare world that might not exist but certainly could. The last resort of the overweight wealthy (or sponsored), The Reeds subjects its "campers" to extreme measures--particularly the regimented system of public humiliation imposed by its director, a glib and sharp-minded sadist called the Professor.

Into the midst of this methodical madness comes Marina Rubin, who experiences all the excesses of The Reeds. The pervasive cruelty of this refined novel distances it from facile conclusions. Amid the mordant social satire, The Reeds' obese campers are far more than merely victims of the system, subjected to impossible social demands for physical perfection. Out of control, fierce, rebellious, or subjugated, they are recognizable human beings, contending with an unjust but efficient authority in their unique and solitary ways.

Erotic entanglements, startling revelations, a furtive intruder, even a possible murder? Not at all what the students of Mind Control class envisioned when they gathered on a ranch outside Buenos Aires for a relaxing weekend. But here nothing is quite what it seems, least of all Magdalena herself, who while recounting the weekend's events, changes her name as often as she changes her mind. Within the taut framework of a murder mystery, Alicia Steimberg weaves a tale far more concerned with who-is-it than with whodunit. In what is probably the celebrated author's most interesting and complex novel, Magdalena conducts us through her tortuous childhood as an Argentine Jew and through her doubts about morality and mortality, the existence of God, and the amorphous nature of identity. Animated by Steimberg's lively dialogue and wit, this eccentric tour of some of the more pressing questions about gender, identity, and existence itself is finally as intriguing and suspenseful as the mysteries large and small, otherworldly and mundane, that it invites us to contemplate.