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.

"The book highlights the many possibilities of the innovative workof these dramatists, and this will, it is to be hoped, help the editors to achieveone of their other key goals: productions of the plays in English." -- TimesLiterary Supplement

"This thoughtfully crafted book with itsinsightful and informative studies elucidates an overlooked, essential component ofthe Latin American literary canon." -- Choice

Contributorsdiscuss 15 works of Latin-American playwrights, delineate the artistic lives ofwomen dramatists of the last half of the twentieth century -- from countries asdiverse as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela -- andhighlight the problems inherent in writing under politically repressivegovernments.