"A moving mural of lives in the underclass of Luanda." -The Guardian In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato's flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. Alongside, disparate stories are woven into the narrative, spanning from the tragic to the comic, from the surreal to the every-day, culminating into a depiction of near-future Luanda. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki among the continent's most accomplished writers. NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD A VANITY FAIR HOT TYPE BOOK FOR APRIL 2018 A VULTURE MUST-READ TRANSLATED BOOK A LIT HUB FAVOURITE BOOK OF THE YEAR A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION OF 2018

One of Crime Reads most anticipated LatinX Horror and Crime Fiction of 2023 This sumptuously written thriller asks probing questions about how we live with each other and with our planet. Raised on his wits on the streets of Central America, the Cobra, a young debt collector and gang enforcer, has never had the chance to discern between right and wrong, until he’s assigned the murder of Polo, a prominent human rights activist—and his friend. When his conscience gives him pause and his patrón catches on, a remote Mayan community offers the Cobra a potential refuge, but the people there are up against predatory mining companies. With danger encroaching, the Cobra is forced to confront his violent past and make a decision about what he’s willing to risk in the future, and who it will be for. Following the Cobra, Polo, a faction of drug-dealing oligarchs, and Jacobo, a child caught in the crosshairs, Rey Rosa maps an extensive web of corruption upheld by decades of political oppression. A scathing indictment of exploitation in all its forms, The Country of Toó is a gripping account of what it means to consider societal change under the constant threat of violence.

Stephen Henighan, a Romanian grammar book and hours of language tapes under his belt, billets with a family as an English teacher in Moldova, a country born from the dismantling of Romania during World War II. As a Westerner in this "lost province" and former Soviet republic, Henighan feels he's an unnerving disappointment for many Moldovans, especially to the MTV-addicted, twenty-year-old Andrei. As a Canadian, Henighan feels at home in this nation adrift. Fifty years of Soviet propaganda have dictated that the Moldovan language is a "degenerate local patois, only distantly related to Romanian." The innocent observation by the author that Moldovan and Romanian are the same language is revolutionary in the tense climate of post-Soviet Moldova, and suddenly Henighan is embroiled in the fierce language-law debates that have thrown the entire country into upheaval.

In 1996, the Guatemalan civil war ended with the signing of the Peace Accords, facilitated by the United Nations and promoted as a beacon of hope for a country with a history of conflict. Twenty years later, the new era of political protest in Guatemala is highly complex and contradictory: the persistence of colonialism, fraught indigenous-settler relations, political exclusion, corruption, criminal impunity, gendered violence, judicial procedures conducted under threat, entrenched inequality, as well as economic fragility. Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala examines the complexities of the quest for justice in Guatemala, and the realities of both new forms of resistance and long-standing obstacles to the rule of law in the human and environmental realms. Written by prominent scholars and activists, this book explores high-profile trials, the activities of foreign mining companies, attempts to prosecute war crimes, and cultural responses to injustice in literature, feminist performance art and the media. The challenges to human and environmental capacities for justice are constrained, or facilitated, by factors that shape culture, politics, society, and the economy. The contributors to this volume include Guatemalans such as the human rights activist Helen Mack Chang, the environmental journalist Magali Rey Rosa, former Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, as well as widely published Guatemala scholars.

Luanda, Angola, 1990. Ndalu is a normal twelve-year-old boy in an extraordinary time and place. Like his friends, he enjoys laughing at his teachers, avoiding homework and telling tall tales. But Ndalus teachers are Cuban, his homework assignments include writing essays on the role of workers and peasants, and the tall tales he and his friends tell are about a criminal gang called Empty Crate which specializes in attacking schools. Ndalu is mystified by the family servant, Comrade Antnio, who thinks that Angola worked better when it was a colony of Portugal, and by his Aunt Dada, who lives in Portugal and doesnt know what a ration card is. In a charming voice that is completely original, Good Morning Comrades tells the story of a group of friends who create a perfect childhood in a revolutionary socialist country fighting a bitter war. But the world is changing around these children, and like all childhoods, Ndalus cannot last. An internationally acclaimed novel, already published in half a dozen countries, Good Morning Comrades is an unforgettable work of fiction by one of Africas most exciting younger writers.

"Ondjaki delivers playful magical realism with delightful defiance." —The Barnes & Noble Review "As with Ondjaki's other novels—including Bom dis camaradas (2001; Good Morning Comrades) and Os Transparentes (2012)—this is a strangely deceptive read. Although the narrative often feels rather whimsical, Angola's long history of colonialism and conflict, its various foreign allies and enemies, and the extraordinary suffering of its population, are menacingly present . . . a brave and highly political work."—Times Literary Supplement "Remarkable . . . at once a coming-of-age novel, rousing adventure, and lyrical experiment. . . . It is no surprise that this energetic and endearing novel is the work of a writer of such stunning accomplishment as Ondjaki. . . . The result is ebullient, cinematic, and downright magical."—Words Without Borders In a crumbling apartment block in Luanda, impoverished families hoard memories to survive a corrupt regime. Odonato—nostalgic for the days of socialism—searches for his son, a petty criminal. As his hope drains away, Odonato's flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, and literary experimentation, Slow Red confirms Ondjaki as one of Africa's major writers. Ondjaki is a writer and filmmaker whose novels and stories have been translated into English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. He lives in Luanda, Angola. Stephen Henighan is a writer and translator. He teaches at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), the first Spanish-American prose writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is both a pivotal and a representative figure in the development of the twentieth-century Spanish-American novel. Asturias's literary apprenticeship in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s is arguably the most crucial and least understood period of his career. In forging his definitions of Guatemalan cultural identity and Spanish-American modernity from a French vantage point, Asturias made literary innovations and generated cultural paradoxes which have proved central to subsequent generations of writers. This study of Asturias's early academic writings, journalism and short fiction, and of his first major novel, "El se"or presidente, provides a prehistory of the contemporary Spanish-American novel.