During Enver Hoxha's totalitarian rule following World War Two, Albania became the most isolated and paranoid European state. Two brothers -- sons of a war hero and domineering official -- come to embody the only possibilities for life under these conditions: capitulation or resistance. Viktor becomes a willing soldier and brings home a beautiful girl, Helena, as his wife. Ismail, shunned by his father and by nature a poet, is emotionally blinded from the mysterious death of his mother when he was 4. As an irresistible attraction develops between Helena and Ismail, they are compelled to uncover the long-hidden tragedy to which they are all heirs.

This volume collects some of the best short fiction from the six Spanish-speaking countries of Central America--Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Selected from stories written between 1963 and 1988, it is a broad representation of active Central American writers.

Many of the stories are quite sophisticated and utilize elements of the absurd or techniques of magical realism. Some stories deal with war--the unending struggle against dictators and military power that engrosses Central Americans. Others explore the realm of the writer's imagination. Some of the writers included are Augusto Monterroso (Guatemala), Carmen Naranjo and Samuel Rovinski (Costa Rica), Rosa Maria Britton and Jaime Garcia Saucedo (Panama), and Alfonso Quijada Urias (El Salvador).

Border crossing may be literal, figurative, imaginary, symbolic or psychological, or, as in the Mexican novelist Juan Tovar's Creature of a Day, all of these at once. This richly conceived prose fiction (a novel in the freshest sense) enchants and seduces the reader with a beguiling tableau of tales told in a language contemporary yet resonant of Caldern de la Barca, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Creature of a Day is inhabited by actors and priests, murderers and harlots, mendicants, merchants, pilgrims and storytellers. Themes of isolation and migration emerge in the wit and repartee of these characters; at the same time, in a stream of literary hallucination that flows from Lautreamont and Strindberg to Beckett, Cocteau, Calvino, and Borges, Creature of a Day washes across the North American consciousness. This award-winning translation by Leland H. Chambers reflects a vital new Mexican literature.

The emerging societies of the Caribbean in the seventeenth century were a riotous assembly of pirates, aristocrats, revolutionaries, and rogues -- outcasts and fortune seekers all. In "They're Cows, We're Pigs, " acclaimed Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa animates this world of bloody chaos and uncertain possibility through the eyes of the young Jean Smeeks, kidnapped in Flanders at age thirteen and sold into indentured servitude on Tortuga, the mythical Treasure Island. Trained in the magic of medicine by le Negre Miel, an African slave healer, and Pineau, a French-born surgeon, Smeeks signs on as a medical officer with the pirate band the Brethren of the Coast. Transformed by the looting and violence of pirate life, Smeeks finds himself both healer and despoiler, servant and mercenary, suspended between the worlds of the law-abiding, tradition-bound "cows" and the freely roaming and raiding "pigs."