The 9th Ibero-American conference on Arti?cial Intelligence IBERAMIA 2004 took place in Mexico for the third time in 16 years, since the ?rst conference organized in Barcelona in January 1988. It was also the second time that the conference was held in the state of Puebla. The ?rst time, in 1996, it was the UniversidaddelaAm' ericasPueblathatwasinchargeofthelocalorganizationof the conference, this year it was the turn of the Instituto Nacional de Astrof' ?sica, ' Optica y Electr' onica, INAOE, to do it. The 1996 conference was the last conference where all the papers were p- sentedinSpanishorPortuguese.Sincethentheproceedingshavebeenpublished in English by Springer in the LNAI series. This linguistic change was a sign of the scienti?c maturity of the Ibero-American arti?cial intelligence community and the best way for it to share with the international arti?cial intelligence c- munity the best results of many of its research groups. It was also the way to open this forum to researchers of other countries to enrich the scienti?c content of the conferences. One relevant feature of the last four conferences with the proceedings p- lished in English by Springer is that, besides the participation of people from many countries, the majority of papers came from Ibero-American researchers.

The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster is a collection of essays on Auster's recent novels and films. Following the example of Beyond the Red Notebook (1995), STEFANIA CIOCIA and JESUS A. GONZALEZ have assembled an international group of scholars to provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's twenty-first-century output and draw connections between the author's early and later production. Adopting various (inter)disciplinary approaches, the contributors-Michelle Banks, Alan Bilton, Mark Brown, Stefania Ciocia, Anita Durkin, Ginevra Geraci, Jesus A. Gonzalez, Francois Hugonnier, Ulrich Meurer, James Peacock, Paolo Simonetti, and Aliki Varvogli-contextualize Auster's position not only in the American canon, but also on the global artistic scene. This volume invites us to take another look at Auster as an inventor of illusions in the most positive sense of the word: not as short-lived, deceitful gimmickry, but rather as an imaginative testing of possibilities, a wilful establishment of real bonds between people, even when these bonds are rooted in the world of storytelling. The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary literature as well as the general reader willing to learn more about Paul Auster's world.