In this modern age, when the means of communication have turned individual and collective history into a spectacle, literature is the privileged space of subjectivity. This book allows us to peer into the fascinating inner world of characters trapped in their particular deliriums: a club of fetishists who discuss their sexual manias, a man in love with a whale-woman, a man whose wife has left him for another woman, and a beautiful secretary who is also a mother feeling asphyxiated by her family. Readers, no matter how they see themselves and what their sexual preferences may be, will experience the same sensation.

Afternoon of the Dinosaur, by Cristina Peri Rossi, one of the most important Spanish writers of our time, was first published in 1976. Due to censorship in Spain under Franco, it was initially distributed only in Latin America. Then, in 1984, it was published again by Plaza y Janes (Barcelona), and in 2008 it was reissued by Tropo Editores (Zaragoza). This volume is composed of eight lyrical and powerful short stories bound together by themes of alienation and generational conflict in the modern world. According to the author, the stories are all connected by a sense of persecution and by the solidarity that this sometimes creates between two persons. The first, From Brother to Sister, deals with the yearnings of love of an adolescent for his sister. In the second, At the Beach, a young couple encounters a child who both mystifies and troubles them with her extraordinary questions. With The Influence of Edgar A. Poe on the Poet Raimundo Arias, we find the deep-felt sense of exile of Peri Rossi herself. Two pieces of this collection that carry the title Simulacrum give us a science-fiction world of space travel in which human feelings are lost. As the author says, the final word of the tale is 'mercy, ' (it is a sense of) pity that I feel for myself and for all human beings, because we are condemned to die, to suffer dictatorships, because we are condemned many times to oppression, and we need to seek out, in the midst of this suffering, our fellow men. As for the title story of this collection, The Afternoon of the Dinosaur, the author confesses that her dreams, at the time of the military dictatorship in Montevideo when people simply disappeared, were often haunted by terrifying dinosaurs. The dinosaur, for her, symbolized fear, danger, the threat of the government. She wanted to tame the dinosaur, to change it into a loving character. It was only after she wrote this story that dinosaurs disappeared from her dreams. Julio Cortazar writes: Cristina Peri Rossi is not only aware of the hells of this world, she understand the lures of paradise. Her exquisite prose projects her readers into a surrealistic realm that is filled with forbidden yet fascinating choices. In his introduction to the Spanish version of La tarde del dinosaurio, he says: In three of the stories from this book the children will lay bare the world of those who claim to control it, and will reduce it to a laughingstock of truth... Brothers and sisters, queens and slaves, false adults incapable of accepting the laws of the game, people that an Aubrey Beardsley or an Egon Schiele would have drawn with the perverse perfection of sterile desire, of a pursuit whose sole incentive is that of not catching the prey, whether it be named Patricia or Alexandra, Igor or Alina. False adults, for the simple reason that adults are false. And the adolescent turns to its past in a last, desperate act of resistance; but its sex and its hair and its voice drag it to the peak that the boy of the dinosaur contemplates in final horror. Now there are no victims or assassins in those rooms of the house; the last of its visitors is able only to utter one useless word: Mercy.

First published in 1490, Tirant lo Blanc has been called "the best book in the world" by no less than Miguel de Cervantes, author of the immortal Don Quixote de la Mancha. And in our own time, Mario Vargas Llosa has said the following: "Tirant lo Blanc is a novel that nourishes that all-encompassing yearning of the great novels of all times which, like the Quixote, War and Peace, La Comedie Humaine, Moby Dick, the saga of Faulkner, seem to want to emulate the Supreme Being in the creation of a world as diverse, complex and self-sufficient as the real world, of a fiction that competes with life in its ever-increasing diversification." A spicy, brutally realistic novel of knights and ladies of medieval times, this book was written in Catalan, translated into Spanish in 1511 in an abridged form, into Italian in the 16th century, into French in the 17th century, and did not make an appearance in English until late in the 20th century. It has since then been made into a movie directed by Vicente Aranda, alternately entitled "The Maidens' Conspiracy." Among the reasons that the world outside of Spain has been somewhat late in responding to the value of this novel may be that it was originally written in Catalan, whose literature is not widely read in the original tongue. But another reason may be its overemphasis on rhetorical elements. As one scholar says, if the novelist had cut many of these elements, "his book would in that case have been reduced to approximately one-fourth of its present size, but quite probably it would now be considered a masterpiece of narration and dialogue." Such has been the aim of this translation: The story line has been slightly abridged, but the most dramatic change is that most of the rhetoric has been eliminated, leaving in the major plot line, with its brutal tournament jousts, bloody battles between the Christian forces and their enemies, its treachery, slapstick humor, ribald bedroom scenes and tender moments of love. As Cervantes puts it in the Quixote, "'Heaven help me ' shouted the curate. 'Here is Tirant lo Blanc Hand it to me, my friend. I tell you that in it I have found a treasure of contentment and a mine of entertainment. Here is Kyrieleison of Montalban, a valiant knight, and his brother, Tomas of Montalban, and the knight Fonseca, and the battle that the valiant Tirant waged with the greyhound, and the witticisms of the maiden Plaerdemavida, along with the amours and deceit of the Widow Repose, and the Empress in love with the squire Hippolytus.'" Having read this novel, who could forget the characters that Martorell has brought to life? Who would not feel grief at the death of Tirant and the princess, no less united in soul than Calisto and Melibea in Spain (making their appearance a few short years later in Fernando de Rojas' masterpiece, La Celestina), than Romeo and Juliet in England, and no less tragic? And in remembering Tirant, who would not smile at the thought of him serving as a go-between for Prince Philippe and the infanta, Ricomana? Could anyone be more delightful than the forthright Plaerdemavida (whose name translates literally as "Pleasure-of-My-Life") - surely one of the best delineated characters in any literature? Or anyone more villainous than the odious Widow Repose - a figure stamped indelibly on our minds, wearing her ridiculous red stockings and hat in the bath? If Don Quixote's Dulcinea did not exist until she took form in his (or in Cervantes') mind, or the windmill that was a giant, or the Cave of Montesinos, they have now come into existence in the mind of every reader of that novel. So may Tirant and his men, the princess, the emperor, Plaerdemavida, also come to life alongside the gentle and not so gentle folk of Cervantes, in every reader's imagination. Let us leave the reader with these final words from the pen of Cervantes about Tirant lo Blanc: "Take him home and read him, and you will see that what I have said of him is true."

In his most celebrated work, Mexican writer Francisco Rojas Gonzalez offers a rare blend of literature and indigenous anthropology. Inspired by his fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, these 13 stories reflect the author's preoccupation with the totality of Mexican life and capture his heralded ability to penetrate the contradictions of human nature. The book is a dramatic presentation of myths, religious beliefs, and customs of Mexican Indians framed in their rigid, overpowering code of ethics. It served as the basis for the 1954 film "Roots," which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1955.

"Solitaire of Love," an achingly lyrical novel by internationally acclaimed Latin American writer Cristina Peri Rossi, explores the sense of emotional exile that sexual passion can evoke. Only the fourth book of Peri Rossi's to be translated into English--the others are "The Ship of Fools, A Forbidden Passion, " and "Dostoevsky's Last Night"--"Solitaire of Love "showcases the mesmerizingly rhythmic language that has become the trademark of this award-winning and prolific author of novels, essay collections, poetry, and short stories.
Tracing the course of a relationship as it evolves into uncompromising self-destruction, the narrator of "Solitaire of Love "becomes addicted to his own passion and to the body of his beloved. Erotic, romantic love becomes bewitchment, producing a heightened state where time is measured in the rhythms of a chosen body and pride becomes subservient to obsession. The specifics of this other body trump any claim to ordinary existence for the narrator, as sex becomes a kind of idolatrous slavery and love becomes a mechanism for self-immolation. As in Peri Rossi's other works, an ambiguous sense of gender and sexuality arise from her uniquely experimental prose and mystically erotic logic. Language is subsumed into this process as a way to bear witness, to transfix and capture the love object. The limbo of obsession, as described by Peri Rossi, creates an infantilizing brand of loneliness, broken by flashes of joy, insight, fury, and fear.
This novel was originally published in Spanish in 1988.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.