The silent rage that seizes a matriarch whose family is feting her eighty-ninth year.The tangle of emotions felt by a sophisticated young woman toward her elderly mother. An adolescent girl's obsessive fear of being looked at. The "giddying sense of compassion" that a blind man introduces into a young housewife's settled existence. Of such is made the world of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer whose finest work is acknowledged to be her exquisitely crafted short stories. Here, in these thirteen of Lispector's most brilliantly conceived stories, mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition. Her characters mirror states of mind. Alienated by their unsettling sense of life's absurdity, they seem at times absorbed in their interior lives and in the passions that dominate and usually defeat them. Giovanni Pontiero's translation has been lauded by Gregory Rabassa as "magnificent."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been described as the greatest writer in Spanish since Cervantes, and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba is considered to be one of his best works. This reflective and atmospheric novel is set in a small Colombian town where the frustrated and stubborn Colonel, a veteran of the 'War of a Thousand Days', is still, after thirty years, waiting for the letter authorising payment of his war pension. The old soldier and his wife mourn the brutal killing of their only son, and the story of their struggle against poverty and sickness culminates in the Colonel's defiant refusal to part with his cherished fighting cock, however serious the consequences. The moving narrative pays tribute to the resilience of human nature and man's will to survive in the face of heavy odds. The novel also throws light on the turbulent religious and political troubles in Latin America. Now revised to include an updated chronology and bibliography, Giovanni Pontiero's acclaimed critical edition provides English-speaking students with an introduction to, and notes on the text, and a selected vocabulary. -- .

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

When a Portuguese proofreader rewrites history by changing a word in a text, he unexpectedly wins the heart of his supervisor, Maria Sara, who encourages him to fabricate more in the grand style of a historical romance. Around this seemingly minor episode, Jose Saramago, "Portugal's great fabulist" ("Los Angeles Times") constructs one of his most ambitious, sweeping novels to date, a magical tale of love, memory, and the revision of things past.

Combining bitter satire, outrageous parody and uncanny hallucinations, this collection of Jose Saramago's earliest stories from the beginning of his writing career attests to the novelist's imaginative power and incomparable skill in elaborating the most extravagant fantasies. Each tale is a wicked, surreal take on life under dictatorship: in 'Embargo' a man drives around a city that is slowly running out of petrol; 'The Chair' recounts what happens when dictator Salazar falls off his chair and dies; in the Kafkaesque 'Things' the life of a civil servant is threatened as objects start to go missing.