"San Juan: Memoir of a City" conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture.
In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodriguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flaneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book--available here in English for the first time--Rodriguez Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.

Set in strife-torn Guatemala City in the early 1980s, this sophisticated, quasi-comedic tale depicts the decline and near-fall of a prominent Guatemalan Jewish family. In the face of military rule, terrorism, and sabotage, Marcos learns the truth about his brother Aaron, only to find that sibling secrets can be every bit as dangerous as civil unrest.

The extraordinary Muna Lee was a brilliant writer, lyric poet, translator, diplomat, feminist and rights activist, and, above all, a Pan-Americanist. During the twentieth century, she helped shape the literary and social landscapes of the Americas. This is the first biography of her remarkable life and a collection of her diverse writings, which embody her vision of Pan America, an old concept that remains new and meaningful today.