On a hot, insomniac night at the Hotel Metropol, the novelist Carlos Fuentes steps onto his balcony only to find another man on the balcony next door. The other man asks for news of the social strife turning into revolution in the unnamed city below them. He reveals himself as the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, permitted to revisit earth once a year for 24 hours based on his theory of eternal return. With tenderness and gallows humor, the novelist and the philosopher unflinchingly tell the story of the beginning of the revolution, its triumph, fanaticism, terror, and retrenchment: a story of love, friendship, family, commitment, passion, corruption, betrayal, violence, and hope.

These poems by Carlos Fuentes Lemus (1973-1999), son of the author of Terra Nostra and Christopher Unborn, are an introduction to the unique voice of a sensitive but unsentimental young poet who became aware of his mortality at a very early age. A hemophiliac who as a child contracted HIV from contaminated blood products, he struggled to come to terms with his condition through the practice of art while paying homage to those artists from the Western canon (and from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) whose work inspired and shaped his own, such as Keats, Van Gogh, Wilde, Rimbaud, Schiele, Kerouac, Elvis, Hendrix, and Dylan. 4:56's heartbreaking "songs and visions" record his fleeting passage through our world.From the Afterword by Juan Goytisolo: "Beautiful, startling lines, without the least self-complacency, imbued with a hidden and unsettling pain. I have always been enchanted by the magic of English poetry, and its ability to express more in fewer words than can other languages that I know. Carlos Fuentes Lemus moved within its sphere almost on tiptoe, oblivious to any rhetoric and easy sentimentalism, with the delicacy and weightlessness with which he fleetingly traced his path through life."

With the practiced eye of a traveler at large, E. Shaskan Bumas portrays characters struggling to define their relationships to each other and to their time. Whether scientists or artisans, punks or new-agers, single mothers or students, activists or children in harm's way, Bumas's characters fill these stories with heart and subversive humor. The Price of Tea in China depicts places as far-flung as a Manhattan ghetto and a provincial Chinese city through an exploration of human relationships that makes each location both foreign and familiar. In "Flag of Fire", an American teacher becomes caught up in the lives of students engaged in China's pro-democracy movement. "Your Cordially Requested Presence" reveals a man's humorous sufferings as he acts the part of fiance for a lesbian friend at her cousin's wedding. "The Attraction to Gravity" brings us a young man whose growing appreciation of his girlfriend's small daughter is threatened by her father's reappearance. In "Cupid's Carriers", a student chronicles college life in the era of punk rock through a journal that takes on a life of its own. In "Emerging", a neighborhood's web of inhabitants is torn apart by a police riot, and in "Spare the Child", a man describes the unplanned pregnancy of his girlfriend with biting dislike.