This landmark novella-one of the central texts of Mexican literature, is eerily relevant to our current dark times-offers a child's-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in "the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods." A middle-class boy grows up in a world of children aping adults (mock wars at recess pit Arabs against Jews), where a child's left to ponder "how many evils and catastrophes we have yet to witness." When Carlos laments the cruelty and corruption, the evils of a vicious class system, his older brother answers: "So what, we are living up to our ears in shit anyway under Miguel Aleman's regime," with "the face of El Senor Presidente everywhere: incessant, private abuse." Sound familiar? Woven into this coming-of-age saga is the terribly intense love Carlos cherishes for his friend's young mother, which has the effect of driving the general cruelties further under the reader's skin. The acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has greatly revised her original translation, enlivening afresh this remarkable work.

Centered around the 1986 attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet, an event that changed Chile forever, My Tender Matador is one of the most explosive, controversial, and popular novels to have been published in that country in decades. It is spring 1986 in the city of Santiago, and Augusto Pinochet is losing his grip on power. In one of the city's many poor neighborhoods works the Queen of the Corner, a hopeless and lonely romantic who embroiders linens for the wealthy and listens to boleros to drown out the gunshots and rioting in the streets. Along comes Carlos, a young, handsome man who befriends the aging homosexual and uses his house to store mysterious boxes and hold clandestine meetings. My Tender Matador is an extraordinary novel of revolution and forbidden love, and a stirring portrait of Chile at an historical crossroads. By turns funny and profoundly moving, Pedro Lemebel's lyrical prose offers an intimate window into the mind of Pinochet himself as the world of Carlos and the Queen prepares to collide with the dictator's own in a fantastic and unexpected way.

Praise for Ernesto Mallo's "Needle in a Haystack"

"A vivid and compelling picture of a society riven by corruption, social breakdown, and casual brutality. A pacy, intense, and thought-provoking read."--"Guardian"

"Martin Cruz Smith and Philip Kerr fans will be rewarded."--"Publishers Weekly"

"A gritty, painful portrait of a dystopian culture spinning further and further out of control. A compelling, blood-stained document of tyranny and brutality told with skill and passion."--"Crime Time"

In the second book in the Superintendent Lascano series, Lascano is drawn into a war between the Buenos Aires chief of police and the Apostles, drug-dealing cops who want to control the city. When the chief of police is murdered, Lascano becomes the Apostles' next target. His only way out of the country is to retrieve the loot from a bungled bank robbery.

Ernesto Mallo paints a scathing portrait of Argentina, where the Junta's generals are paraded in court in civilian clothes and treated like mere petty thieves. Corruption and violence continue to rule, but at the center of the novel lies a touching portrayal of two broken men, a cop and a robber, whose humanity is sorely tested by the troubles racking their beloved country.

Born in 1948, Ernesto Mallo is a published essayist, newspaper columnist, and playwright. He is a former militant, pursued by the dictatorship as a member of the guerilla movement.

Cesar Aira's newest novel in English is not about a conventional doctor. Single,in his forties, and poor, Dr. Aira is a skeptic. His personality - his weaknesses,whims, and pet peeves - is summed up in a series of digressions and regressions but he has a very special gift for miracles. He no longer cares about miracles,however, and has no faith in them. Perhaps he is even a little ashamed about his supernatural powers. Such is Dr. Aira, who also has to confront his arch-enemy- chief of the Pinero Hospital, Dr. Actyn - who is constantly trying to prove that Dr. Aira is a charlatan. Poor Dr. Aira is indeed a worker of miracles, but Cesar Aira - the magesterial author - sends the very human doctor stumbling toward the biggest trap of all, in this magical book.

Daily conversations in outdoor cafes with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera's goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, distress, and incipient madness. The two men's uneasiness soon becomes a nightmare as the TV adventure advances with a real-life plot - involving a mutant strain of killer algae - to take over the world! The Conversations, a reality within a fiction within a parallel reality, is hilariously funny and surprisingly touching.

A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country."

The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya's ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez - known as the Warlock - who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944, failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. Tyrant Memory takes place during the month between the coup and the strike. Its protagonist, Haydee Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing the dictator's death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to flee when the very much alive Warlock starts to ruthlessly hunt down his enemies. The novel moves between Haydee's political awakening in diary entries and Clemente's frantic and often hysterically comic efforts to escape capture. Tyrant Memory - sharp, grotesque, moving, and often hilariously funny - is an unforgettable incarnation of a coun- try's history in the destiny of one family.

The unforgettable inspiration for the Academy Award winning Il Postino, this classic novel established Antonio Skarmeta s reputation as one of the most representative authors of the post-boom generation in contemporary Latin American letters (Christian Science Monitor). Boisterously funny and passionate, The Postman tells of young love ignited by the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Set in the colorful, ebullient years preceding the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the book has been translated into nearly twenty-five languages around the world.

A beautiful librarian pursued by the Nazis must protect a mysterious document said to be penned by God's own hand
Emilio Calderon is a true master of the historical novel, able to infuse a specific time and place with clarion detail and an aura of magic. In "The Creator's Map," he vividly re-creates the shadowy schemes, romantic entanglements, and divided loyalties of a Europe torn apart by World War II. Told from the perspective of Jose Maria, a Spanish architect in Rome, "The Creator's Map" brings to life the harrowing days surrounding the rise and fall of fascism as he, along with a passionate young librarian and an Italian prince, become entangled in a web of intrigue, love, and deceit involving a fateful map whose secrets have the power to destroy them.

Traverse Chile's literary and geographic landscape with some of its best writers. Let Ariel Dorfman take you to Santiago with a prodigal son, discovering his own country for the first time; travel to the remote south with Enrique Valdes, and enjoy the charms of Valparaiso with Pablo Neruda. Many of these twenty-two stories appear in English for the first time.

Pacheco, Battles in the Desert. Intense, despairing accounts of life in Mexico City.

This "powerful, humane," prize-winning novel of politics, ballet, and a spectacular heist by a reluctant master thief and his eager young protege, "conjures...a contemporary Santiago, Chile, where the memory of Pinochet's reign and the 'disappearing' of citizens still looms" (Publishers Weekly). With prisons overflowing in Chile, the president declares a general amnesty for all nonviolent criminals. Angel Santiago, a youth determined to avenge abuse he received in jail, seeks out the notorious bank robber Nicolas Vergara Grey, whose front-page exploits won him a reputation he would rather leave behind. Their plan for an ambitious and daring robbery is complicated by the galvanizing presence of Victoria Ponce, a virtuosic dancer and high-school dropout whose father was a victim of the regime.

Praised for his "ability to place a personal story in the context of a national upheaval and make it warm, funny and universal" (San Francisco Chronicle), Antonio Skarmeta sets this exuberant love story against the backdrop of the new Chile, free from the Pinochet dictatorship but beholden to the perils of globalization. The Dancer and the Thief, which won Spain's prestigious Planeta Prize, is a remarkable new novel from one of South America's finest storytellers. Reading group guide included."

Battles in the Desert & Other Stories, a collection of short fiction that deals mainly with themes of childhood and innocence betrayed, is the first book of Pacheco's fiction to appear in English. here there are no narrative arabesques, no flights of magical-realist fancy. Instead, Pacheco confronts the reader with the uglier sides of urban Mexico - its grime, its beggars, its suffocating pollution, the constricted lives of its lower middle class - all with a simplicity and directness of style impeccably shaped and clearly distilled.

With prisons overflowing in Chile, the president declares a general amnesty for all nonviolent criminals. Angel Santiago, a youth determined to avenge abuse he received in jail, seeks out the notorious bank robber Nicolas Vergara Grey, whose front-page exploits won him a reputation he would rather leave behind. Their plan for an ambitious and daring robbery is complicated by the galvanizing presence of Victoria Ponce, a virtuosic dancer and high-school dropout whose father was a victim of the regime. Praised for his "ability to place a personal story in the context of a national upheaval and make it warm, funny and universal" (San Francisco Chronicle), Antonio Skarmeta sets this exuberant love story against the backdrop of the new Chile, free from the Pinochet dictatorship but beholden to the perils of globalization. The Dancer and the Thief, which won Spain's prestigious Planeta Prize, is a remarkable new novel from one of South America's finest storytellers.