Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) was Argentina's leading writer, educator, and politician of the nineteenth century, and served as President from 1868 to 1874. Of his several autobiographies, the best-known Recollections of a Provincial Past is one of the indisputable classics of Spanish American literature, as well as one of the earliest autobiographies written in the Americas in Spanish. Written in exile in 1850, the memoirs describe his childhood and adolescence in an Andean province whose customs were still those of a colony. Sarmiento presents his life as the triumph of civilization over barbarism; looking back on his youth, he measures his wealth and strength by the accumulation of enriching personal and political experiences. He compares himself to the newly independent Argentina, claiming to be a historically representative individual whose trajectory serves to illuminate contemporary South America.

With an introduction by award-winning novelist Colm Tóibín

In 1960s Central Mexico, two sisters, Delfina and María de Jesús González, known as 'Las Poquianchis', run a small-town brothel. Kidnapped, drugged and beaten, their young workers are desperate for escape.

The Dead Girls is the discovery of these young women, buried in the back yard. In the laconic tones of a police report, Jorge Ibargüengoitia investigates these horrific murders and their motives.

A black comedy, both moving and cruelly funny, Ibargüengoitia's work is a potent and entertaining blend of sex and mayhem.

With the harrowing power of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden comes a remarkable work of fiction. Winner of the prestigious Premio La Nacion Prize for Fiction in 2000, A Secret for Julia brilliantly depicts the lasting psychological attacks of Argentina's reign of repression and terror on a new, seemingly innocent generation. Set mainly in 1990s London, interlaced with vivid flashbacks to Buenos Aires, Patricia Sagastizabal's novel tells the emotionally wrenching story of Mercedes Beecher, an Argentinian writer living in self-imposed exile in London with her teenaged daughter, Julia. When a mysterious figures appears from her past, Mercedes must endure a new round of psychological terror and reveal herself to her inquisitive but embittered, daughter in a way that she never believed possible. A dramatic story of retribution and conscience, A Secret for Julia touches on many compelling themes: the politics of institutionalized and sanctioned cruelty; the wistfulness of a life lived in exile; the bonds of family, justice, and redemption. Much of A Secret for Julia reads like a personal diary, yet Sagastizabal propels it forward with elements of astonishing intrigue, drama, and terror. The savage murders and tortures that came to decimate an entire generation of Argentinian students and activists in the 1970s may remain—even twenty-five years later—so vivid and searing that they can be expressed only through the palette of fiction. In this way, Sagastizabal's novel represents the voice of the fallout from Argentina's so-called "dirty war," the voice of the next generation—Julia's generation. A Secret for Julia is a testament to the changing of the guard—an unforgettable, astounding novel for one simple reason: the reader is left with the lingering notion that it might be frighteningly close to the truth.