Thirteen-year-old Juan's summer is off to a terrible start. First, his parents separate. Then, almost as bad, Juan is sent away to his strange Uncle Tito's house for the entire holiday! Who wants to live with an oddball recluse who has zigzag eyebrows, drinks fifteen cups of smoky tea a day, and lives inside a huge, mysterious library? As Juan adjusts to his new life among teetering, dusty shelves, he notices something odd: the books move on their own! He rushes to tell Uncle Tito, who lets his nephew in on a secret: Juan is a Princeps Reader, which means books respond magically to him, and he's the only one who can find the elusive, never-before-read Wild Book. An unforgettable adventure story about books, libraries, and the power of reading.

With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows. Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN Promotes Veering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernandez and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.

CONTRAPPASSO is an independent biannual magazine of international writing published in Sydney, Australia. Issue 4 is our most international to date, featuring writing from Mexico, China, Russia, Italy, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, the USA, and Australia. Highlights include the Crate-Diggers' Symposium - in-depth interviews with America's leading rare music anthologists - and a series of tributes to the late Seamus Heaney. We have a newly translated short story by the Mexican writer Juan Villoro and new fiction by Clive Sinclair and Elisabeth Murray; with poetry by David Howard, Hong Ying, John Leonard, Tegan Jane Schetrumpf, Joe Dolce, Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, Mira Peck, Chris Oakey, Mikhail Yeryomin, Morris Lurie, Rogelio Guedea, Erin Martine Sessions, Floyd Salas, Phillip A. Ellis, Richard Tipping, and Todd Turner.

A brilliant, prize-winning collection of stories by Mexico s most important living writer. From the semiotics of pet iguanas to the disillusionment of mariachi singers, Villoro reveals the deep dissatisfactions and absurdities of life in Mexico and its carnivalesque capital. We encounter a border trucker making a movie about illegal migrants, a cuckolded football superstar, and a gluten-free American journalist seeking the authentic Mexican experience. A master of the post-modern narrative, Villoro gives us contemporary Mexico through a complex interplay of culture and character psychology in the most surprising, fresh and humorous ways."