Selected by Guernica magazine as an "Editors' Picks: Best of 2013"Unfurling like a medieval book of days, each page of Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days has an illuminating story that takes inspiration from that date of the calendar year, resurrecting the heroes and heroines who have fallen off the historical map, but whose lives remind us of our darkest hours and sweetest victories.Challenging readers to consider the human condition and our own choices, Galeano elevates the little-known heroes of our world and decries the destruction of the intellectual, linguistic, and emotional treasures that we have all but forgotten.Readers will discover many inspiring narratives in this collection of vignettes: the Brazilians who held a smooch-in" to protest against a dictatorship for banning kisses that undermined public morals" the astonishing day Mexico invaded the United States and the sacrilegious" women who had the effrontery to marry each other in a church in the Galician city of A Coruna in 1901. Galeano also highlights individuals such as Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, the first bishop of Brazil, who was eaten by Caete Indians off the coast of Alagoas, as well as Abdul Kassem Ismael, the grand vizier of Persia, who kept books safe from war by creating a walking library of 117,000 tomes aboard four hundred camels, forming a mile-long caravan.Beautifully translated by Galeano's longtime collabourator, Mark Fried, Children of the Days is a majestic humanist treasure that shows us how to live and how to remember. It awakens the best in us.

In Mirrors, Galeano smashes aside the narrative of conventional history and arranges the shards into a new pattern, to reveal the past in radically altered form. From the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century cityscapes, we glimpse fragments in the lives of those who have been overlooked by traditional histories: the artists, the servants, the gods and the visionaries, the black slaves who built the White House, and the women who were bartered for dynastic ends

"Genesis," the first volume in Eduardo Galeano's "Memory of Fire" trilogy, is both a meditation on the clashes between the Old World and the New and, in the author's words, an attempt to "rescue the kidnapped memory of all America." It is a fierce, impassioned, and kaleidoscopic historical experience that takes us from the creation myths of the Makiritare Indians of the Yucatan to Columbus's first, joyous moments in the New World to the English capture of New York.

The third volume of Eduardo Galeano's "Memory of Fire" trilogy, "Century of the Wind" offers a panorama of Galeano's singular vision of the past, turbulent century: from the bucolic New Jersey laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison to the armies of Emiliano Zapata and Fidel Castro to the Reagan-era CIA "neutralizations" in the forests of Latin America. Dizzying, enraging, and beautifully written, "Century of the Wind" is a sweeping interpretation of the Americas no work of history has previously imagined.

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.

This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

In 1984 Sebastiao Salgado began what would be a fifteen-month project of photographing the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa in the countries of Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and Sudan, where approximately one million people died from extreme malnutrition and related causes. Working with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, Salgado documented the enormous suffering and the great dignity of the refugees. This early work became a template for his future photographic projects about other afflicted people around the world. Since then, Salgado has again and again sought to give visual voice to those millions of human beings who, because of military conflict, poverty, famine, overpopulation, pestilence, environmental degradation, and other forms of catastrophe, teeter on the edge of survival. Beautifully produced, with thoughtful supporting narratives by Orville Schell, Fred Ritchin, and Eduardo Galeano, this first U.S. edition brings some of Salgado's earliest and most important work to an American audience for the first time. Twenty years after the photographs were taken, "Sahel: The End of the Road" is still painfully relevant. Born in Brazil in 1944, Sebastiao Salgado studied economics in Sao Paulo and Paris and worked in Brazil and England. While traveling as an economist to Africa, he began photographing the people he encountered. Working entirely in a black-and-white format, Salgado highlights the larger meaning of what is happening to his subjects with an imagery that testifies to the fundamental dignity of all humanity while simultaneously protesting its violation by war, poverty, and other injustices. 'The planet remains divided,' Salgado explains. 'The first world in a crisis of excess, the third world in a crisis of need.' This disparity between the haves and the have-nots is the subtext of almost all of Salgado's work.

"Days and Nights succeeds not only because of its socio-political authenticity and lyrical style but because of its interweaving of anger and tenderness, elation and sorrow."
"--The Nation"

Days and Nights of Love and War is the personal testimony of one of Latin America's foremost contemporary political writers. In this fascinating journal and eloquent history, Eduardo Galeano movingly records the lives of struggles of the Latin American people, under two decades of unimaginable violence and extreme repression. Alternating between reportage, personal vignettes, interviews, travelogues, and folklore, and richly conveyed with anger, sadness, irony, and occasional humor, Galeano pays loving tribute to the courage and determination of those who continued to believe in, and fight for, a more human existence. The Lannan Foundation awarded the 1999 Cultural Prize for Freedom to Eduardo Galeano, in recognition of those "whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry and expression."

Originally published in Cuba, Days and Nights of Love and War won the Casa de las Americas prize in 1978."

In a series of mock lesson plans and a "program of study" Galeano provides an eloquent, passionate, funny and shocking exposé of First World privileges and assumptions. From a master class in "The Impunity of Power" to a seminar on "The Sacred Car"—with tips along the way on "How to Resist Useless Vices" and a declaration of the "The Right to Rave"—he surveys a world unevenly divided between abundance and deprivation, carnival and torture, power and helplessness.

We have accepted a "reality" we should reject, he writes, one where poverty kills, people are hungry, machines are more precious than humans, and children work from dark to dark. In the North, we are fed on a diet of artificial need and all made the same by things we own; the South is the galley slave enabling our greed.

'Football is a pleasure that hurts' This unashamedly emotional history of football is a homage to the romance and drama, spectacle and passion of a 'great pagan mass'. Through stories of superstition, heartbreak, tragedy, luck, heroes and villains, those who lived for football and those who died for it, Eduardo Galeano celebrates the glory of a game that - however much the rich and powerful try to control it - still retains its magic. 'The Uruguayan whose writing got right to the heart of football ... readers were never in doubt of the warmth of the blood running through his veins' Guardian 'Galeano can run rings round our glamorous football intelligentsia' When Saturday Comes 'Stands out like Pele on a field of second-stringers' New Yorker

Throughout his career, Eduardo Galeano has turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Isabelle Allende said his works "invade the reader's mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing and power of his idealism."

"Mirrors," Galeano's most ambitious project since "Memory of Fire," is an unofficial history of the world seen through history's unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano notes: "Official history has it that Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind "

Recalling the lives of artists, writers, gods, and visionaries, from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York, of the black slaves who built the White House and the women erased by men's fears, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes, "Mirrors" is a magic mosaic of our humanity.

Parable, paradox, anecdote, dream, and autobiography blend into an exuberant world view and affirmation of human possibility.

"The factual skeleton of the author's life is given flash and blood in his strangely beautiful book, in which poetry, fiction, autobiography, history, fantasy and political commentary mingle and reinforce each other in unexpected ways." —Jay Parini, New York Times Book Review

"[Galeano] is a dangerous radical storyteller, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, like Isabel Allende, and like Pablo Neruda before them. . . . The Book of Embraces is a mosaic, or Deigo Rivera mural in words." —John Leonard, New York Newsday

"In The Book of Embraces, Galeano goes out on the tightrope and then levitates in the air above it. . . . [His] subject is nothing less that the variety of human life and love." —Alan Ryan, Washington Post Book World

"In an enchanting book of wonders, Uruguayan writer Galeano applies the collage-like technique of Memory of Fire . . . to his own life and the contemporary scene . . . Galeano's surreal drawings complement the text, blending wild imagination, pointed satire and old-fashioned charm." —Publishers Weekly

Rodolfo Walsh was a writer of crime novels, a tireless investigative journalist who uncovered real political crimes, an instant historian of a turbulent and violent era in Argentinian and Latin American politics. He was in Cuba in 1960, participating in setting up the first revolutionary press service in Latin America, "Prensa Latina", when a coded telex arrived in their offices by mistake. After sleepless nights and with one cryptography manual, Walsh deciphered the plans for the US invasion of Cuba being planned in Guatemala by the CIA. Walsh was active in the Montonero guerrilla in Argentina, co-ordinating information and intelligence work. In that capacity he made public the existence of ESMA, the Naval Mechanics School which was the main military torture centre. In his own name he wrote an Open Letter to the Military Junta, a year from the coup and a day before his death, denouncing the dirty war. He was gunned down in the streets of Buenos Aires by a military death squad. This is an account of Rudolfo Walsh's life. It includes extended excerpts from his varied writings.

In this kaleidoscope of reflections, renowned South American author Eduardo Galeano ranges widely, from childhood to love, music, plants, fear, indignity, and indignation. In the signal style of his bestselling Memory of Fire trilogy--brief fragments that build steadily into an organic whole--Galeano offers a rich, wry history that is both calmly philosophical and fiercely political.

From Eduardo Galeano, one of Latin America's greatest living writers, author of the Memory of Fire trilogy, comes Children of the Days, a new kind of history that shows us how to remember and how to live This book is shaped like a calendar. Each day brings with it a story: a journey, feast or tragedy that really happened on that date, from all possible years and all corners of the world. From Abdul Kassem Ismail, the tenth-century Persian who never went anywhere without his library - all seventeen thousand books of it, on four hundred camels; to the Brazilian city of Sorocaba, which on February 8 1980 responded to the outlawing of public kissing by becoming one huge kissodrome; to July 1 2008, the day the US government decided to remove Nelson Mandela's name from its list of dangerous terrorists, Children of the Days takes aim at the pretensions of official history and illuminates moments and heroes that we have all but forgotten. Through this shimmering historical mosaic runs a common thread, one that joins humanity's darkest hours to its sweetest victories. Children of the Days is the story of our lives. 'Passionate and humane ... so funny and so moving' - Philip Pullman 'Galeano performs the sort of extraordinary feats of compassion, artistry, and imagination achieved in fiction by his fellow visionary Latin American writers, especially Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Bolano' - Booklist, starred review Eduardo Galeano is one of Latin America's most distinguished writers. He is the author of the three-volume Memory of Fire; Open Veins of Latin America; Soccer in Sun and Shadow; The Book of Embraces; Walking Words; Upside Down; and Voices in Time. Born in Montevideo in 1940, he lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for years before returning to Uruguay. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. He is the recipient of many international prizes.

'Not since Guy de Maupasant has the short literary form been imbued with such grace, elegance and poignancy . . . these quintessential and often poetic pearls astonish, inspire reflection and entertain' Morning Star The internationally acclaimed last work by the bestselling Latin American writer Master storyteller Eduardo Galeano was unique among his contemporaries (Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa among them) for his commitment to retelling our many histories, including the stories of those who were disenfranchised. A philosopher poet, his nonfiction is infused with such passion and imagination that it matches the intensity and the appeal of Latin America's very best fiction. Published here for the first time in an elegant English translation by long-time collaborator Mark Fried, Hunter of Stories is a deeply considered collection of Galeano's final musings on history, memory, humour, tragedy and loss. Written in his signature style - vignettes that fluidly combine dialogue, fables, and anecdotes - every page displays the original thinking and compassion that made Galeano one of the most original and beloved voices in world literature.

"At last, a marvelous translation into English of the soulful and celebratory and heartbreaking words of Juan Gelman, one of Latin America's most extraordinary poets."--Ariel Dorfman, author of "Death and the Maiden

"Perhaps the most admirable element of [Gelman's] poetry is the unthinkable tenderness he shows where paroxysms of rejection and denouncement would be justified, or his calling upon so many shadows for one voice to lull and comfort, a permanent caress of words on unknown tombs."--Julio Cortazar

"Gelman's poetry is epic in its scope--no corner of life goes unnoticed in this work. Here we find politics and history as seen through one vital human spirit. Rendered in a breathless style, this is the diary of a human heart in a rough world where artistry is the first salvation."--Oscar Hijuelos

"This selection of Juan Gelman's poetry introduces to an English-speaking readership the full range of Argentina's leading poet and a chief architect of Latin America's postcolonial social conscience."--Victor Perera, author of "Unfinished Conquest: The Tragedy of Guatemala

"This is a voice that sings and makes others sing. It speaks of struggles and dignity: It offers a faith that springs from doubt and a sense of freeedom strengthened by prison walls. It celebrates life while standing in its very midst."--Eduardo Galeano, from the Foreword

The fall of Communism has been an epoch-making event. The distinguished contributors to After the Fall explain to us the meaning of Communism's meteoric trajectory - and explore the rational grounds for socialist endeavour and commitment in a world which remains dangerous and divided. The contributors include the Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, the French economist Andre Gorz, and the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas. Eduardo Galeano explains how the now world looks from the South, Diane Elson explores how the market might be socialized, Ralph Miliband writes on the harshness of Leninism, Hans Magnus Enzenberger argues that the capitalist 'bad fairy' granted the Left's wishes in disconcerting ways. Lynne Segal looking at the condition of women sees no reason to abandon her libertarian, feminist and socialist convictions, while Maxine Molyneux considers the implications for women of the fall of Communism. Giovanni Arrighi asks whether Marxism understood the 'American Century', Fredric Jameson pursues a conversation on the new world order, Ivan Szelenyi explains who will be the new rulers of Eastern Europe, and Robin Blackburn reflects on the history of socialist programmes, with the benefit of hindsight. Fred Halliday and Edward Thompson disagree about how Communism ended but share worries about what is in store for the post-Communist countries. Alexander Cockburn regrets the death of the Soviet Union. And Goeran Therborn eloquent proves that it is still possible to imagine a future beyond capitalism... and beyond socialism?

With woodcuts by José Francisco Borges

Translated by Mark Fried

From the author of Memory of Fire, a brilliant feat of storytelling in the tradition of Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales.

In Walking Words world-renowned author Eduardo Galeano draws on the folklore of rural and urban Latin America to discover and retell "the stories of ghouls and fools that Id like to write." These tales are beautifully illustrated by his collaborator, the Brazilian woodcut artist José Francisco Borges, and become testaments to the power of stories to make and remake and enchant the world.

"Anyone with a liking for fables, aphorisms, myths, fairy tales, philosophical parables, childrens stories, lurid tabloid headlines or clever graffiti will find plenty to enjoy. . . . At his best Galeano rivals such masters of the fable as Kafka and that other Borges, and it is to their work that his haunting pages should rightly be compared."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

Eduardo Galeano is also the author of Open Veins of Latin America, Days and Nights of Love and War, The Book of Embraces, We Say No, and other works. He is a regular contributor to the Nation. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.