The way you hold a cello, the way light lands in a Caravaggio, the way the castrati hit notes like no one else could-a lifetime of conversations about art and music and history unfolds for Nora Garcia as she and a crowd of friends and fans send off her recently deceased ex-husband, Juan. Like any good symphony, there are themes and repetitions and contrapuntal notes. We pingpong back and forth between Nora's life with Juan (a renowned pianist and composer, and just as accomplished a raconteur) and the present day (the presentness of the past), where she sits among his familiar things, next to his coffin, breathing in the particular mix of mildew and lilies that overwhelm this day and her thoughts. In Glantz's hands, music and art access our most intimate selves, illustrating and creating our identities, and offering us ways to express love and loss and bewilderment when words cannot suffice. As Nora says, "Life is an absurd wound: I think I deserve to be given condolences."

"We can read The Magician of Vienna not just as a work of literature but as one of the Holy Books in which we store humanity's imaginary." -- Mario Bellatin, author of Beauty Salon The heartbreaking final volume in Sergio Pitol's groundbreaking memoir-essay-fiction-hybrid "Trilogy of Memory" finds Pitol boldly and passionately weaving fiction and autobiography together to tell of his life lived through literature as a way to stave off the advancement of a degenerative neurological condition causing him to lose the use of language. Fiction invades autobiography--and vice versa--as Pitol writes to forestall the advancement of degenerative memory loss. "Pitol's writing -- the way he constructs sentences, inflects Spanish, twists meanings and stresses particular words -- reflects the multiplicity of languages he has read and embraced. Reading him is like reading through the layers of many languages at once." -- Valeria Luiselli, author of The Story of My Teeth Sergio Pitol, the greatest living Mexican writer, winner of the Juan Rulfo and Cervantes prizes, is profoundly influential to the current generation of Spanish-language writers, including Valeria Luiselli, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Yuri Herrera.

With impressive accompanying photographs, this travelogue relates the experiences lived by the author during two journeys through the country of India. Along with the author, readers witness not only breathtaking landscapes and a stunning diversity of people, but also ceremonial events and traditions. Indian culture is depicted in its full and frequently hectic splendor in this astonishing book that will appeal to readers' five senses. "Con impresionantes fotografias acompanantes, esta narrativa de viajes relata las experiencias vividas por la autora durante dos viajes que hizo a la India. Junto a la autora, el lector puede ser testigo no solo de paisajes impresionantes y una increible diversidad de personas, pero tambien de eventos ceremoniales y tradiciones. La cultura india aparece en su mas puro y frecuentemente frenetico resplandor en este asombroso libro que apelara a los cinco sentidos del lector."

""What do I feel?"" asks the narrator, Nora GarcA-a, as she goes back to a Mexican village she has not visited in years to attend the funeral of her ex-husband, a famous pianist who has died of a massive heart attack. This deeply moving novel is the unspoken answer to Nora's self-questioning. "The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of," Pascal said, and this aphorism of knowing and not knowing is at the core of the novel. Employing motifs of "the heart," modes of music from the tango to Bach, and allusions to poetry, the text is a rich amalgam that reveals a life lived deep within the culture of the late twentieth century.

Like her ex-husband, Nora is a musician, a cellist, and so it is fitting that her novel takes the form of a canon and fugue: phrases circle and repeat, variations are introduced, motifs come and go and intermingle, reflecting a paralysis of the grieving.

The novel moves inexorably toward the burial and the revelation of Nora's complex, emotional reaction to Juan's death. Throughout the novel, Nora is moving in the "wake" of that death, being pulled along by the ceremonies of the funeral, the mass, the burial-and her grief and rage, suppressed, never spoken of, is made palpable to the reader through the indirection of memories. For her rich, nuanced evocation of states of mind and emotion, Margo Glantz can stand proudly alongside such modern masters as Virginia Woolf and William Gass.

One of the most prolific and respected authors of Mexico, Margo Glantz is not only a distinguished award-winning novelist, but also renowned as a lecturer, critic, journalist, and translator. She teaches literature at the National University of Mexico and has been a resident writer and scholar at various universities in the United States, including Yale, Harvard, and Princeton universities.

José Tomas de Cuéllar was a Mexican writer noted for his delicate sense of humour and gift for caricature. La Noche Buena and Baile Y Cochino are two novellas written in the costumbrista style made popular by the periodical press in which these sketches of contemporary manners were first published. La Noche Buena describes middle class life in which people pursue pleasure and entertainment without regard to Catholic morality. Baile Y Cochino depicts Mexican women and their dedication to fashion. It is through them that the novelist examines a scoiety that is susceptible to foreign values, the importation of which radically altered the face of Mexico and its traditional customs.