Like waves ebbing and flowing, love surges and subsides among four friends who share a vacation at the house on the beach. As they navigate the seas of love and friendship, jealousy and unfaithfulness, Elena, Marta, Eduardo, and Rafael are swept up in the opposing currents that flow between security and personal freedom, marriage and sexual liberation, family and work, provincial and city life, and traditional and unconventional gender roles.

This deceptively simple novel, published in Mexico in 1966 as La casa en la playa and here translated into English for the first time, is an important work by one of Mexico's, and indeed Latin America's, major writers of the twentieth century. Juan Garcia Ponce helped Mexican arts and letters break out of the ossified styles and themes of the post-Revolutionary "Mexican School" with works that explore the conflict between individual desire and the demands of family and work. Written at a turning point in his career, The House on the Beach foreshadows his embrace of the erotic encounter as a means of undermining rigid, socially constructed personal identity. It supports feminist views and probes deeply into the contradictions, backwardness, and progress of modern Mexican society.

Alurista. Gary Soto. Bernice Zamora. Jose Montoya. These names, luminous to some, remain unknown to those who have not yet discovered the rich variety of late twentieth century Chicano poetry. With the flowering of the Chicano Movement in the mid-1960s came not only increased political awareness for many Mexican Americans but also a body of fine creative writing. Now the major voices of Chicano literature have begun to reach the wider audience they deserve. Bruce-Novoa's Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos-the first booklength critical study of Chicano poetry-examines the most significant works of a body of literature that has grown dramatically in size and importance in less than two decades. Here are insightful new readings of the major writings of Abelardo Delgado, Sergio Elizondo, Rodolfo Gonzales, Miguel Mendez, J. L. Navarro, Raul Salinas, Ricardo Sanchez, and Tino Villanueva, as well as Alurista, Soto, Zamora, and Montoya. Close textual analyses of such important works as I Am Joaquin, Restless Serpents, and Floricanto en Aztlan enrich and deepen our understanding of their imagery, themes, structure, and meaning. Bruce-Novoa argues that Chicano poetry responds to the threat of loss, whether of hero, barrio, family, or tradition. Thus Jose Montoya elegizes a dead Pachuco in "El Louie," and Raul Salinas laments the disappearance of a barrio in "A Trip through the Mind Jail." But this elegy at the heart of Chicano poetry is both lament and celebration, for it expresses the group's continuing vitality and strength. Common to twentieth-century poetry is the preoccupation with time, death, and alienation, and the work of Chicano poets-sometimes seen as outside the traditions of world literature-shares these concerns. Bruce-Novoa brilliantly defines both the unique and the universal in Chicano poetry.