Curbstone Press,U.S. – förlag

The Censors is the only bilingual collection of fiction by Luisa Valenzuela, one of Latin America's best known and most widely translated authors. This selection of stories from Clara, Strange Things Happen Here, and Open Door, which delves into the personal and political realities under authoritarian rule, gives a rich representation of her literary talent.

Winner of the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, The Concrete River’s poems illuminate the gritty idiosyncrasies of immigrant life in urban barrios spanning Los Angeles to Chicago to Harlem. Luis J. Rodríguez lends powerful voices to those struggling to keep the gas on, to find work, and to keep love.  Populated by a vibrant cast of characters, ranging from the drugged, to the eccentric, to the heartbroken, Rodríguez’s poems protest capitalism, violence, and exploitation while reveling in the potential of compassion.

The Bird Who Cleans the World and other Mayan Fables is collection of Jakaltek Mayan folktales, first told to the author by his mother and the elders of his Guatemalan village. They deal with the themes of creation, nature, mutual respect, and ethnic relations and conflicts. Told here for the first time in English and illustrated with Mayan images, these stories and fables speak eloquently of an ancient culture, at once preserving its history and recreating its tradition.

A 14 year-old boy sits in the darkness of the Holiday Theater watching a scene of anti-Mexican racism in a Rock Hudson / Elizabeth Taylore movie. This scene, this memory, is at the heart of Scene from the Movie GIANT, a remarkable book-length poem in five parts by Tino Villanueva. Villanueva excavates the meaning of this scene and in doing so grapples with urgent questions of cultural identity.

Gioconda Belli's poetry, widely published and revered in Latin America and Europe, celebrates the longing for a society in which humanity constructs its future, animated by an inextinguishable erotic, maternal, and transcentendly loving desire. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his book, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, her poetry is a ""kind of public love poetry that comes clower, to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I [have] yet heard.""

Song of the Simple Truth (Canción de la verdad sencilla) is the first bilingual edition of Julia de Burgos' complete poems. Numbering more than 200, these poems form a literary landmark—the first time her poems have appeared in a complete edition in either English or Spanish. Many of the verses presented here had been lost and are presented here for the first time in print. De Burgos broke new ground in her poetry by fusing a romantic temperament with keen political insights. This book will be essential reading for lovers of poetry and for feminists.

Cheryl Savageau writes of poverty, mixed ancestry, nature, and family in poems that are simultaneously tough and tender, and salted with a rich folk humor from her Abenaki and French Canadian ancestry.

This collection -- ""A brilliant fingerprint of the city of Montevideo"" (Eduardo Galeano) -- includes the best of renowned Uruguayan writer Mane Benedetti's stories from over 40 years of publishing. In these stories of powerful sudden impact, Benedetti plumbs with deep psychological insight both the dreams and frustrations of the middle-class in a bureaucratic society, as well as the pain and disorientation of political exile. In his On Arts And Professions, Benedetti wrote, ""the effect of the short story is the surprise, the astonishment, the revelation"".

This collection of 14 stories - each a harrowing sketch of the Vietnam War and its aftermath - offers American readers a glimpse offamiliar territory, but from an unfamiliar perspective. Often writing from a young woman's point of view, Le Minh Khue, a war veteran who served in the Youth Volunteers Brigade, uses simple, understated prose to describe numbing horrors: ""There were three of us. Three girls. We lived in a cavern at the foot of a strategic hill ... Our job was to sit there. Whenever a bomb exploded, we had to run up, figure out how much earth was needed to fill the hold, count the unexploded bombs, and, if necessary, detonate them. They called us the Ground Reconnaissance Team. That title inspired in us a passion to do heroic deeds and therefore our work was not that simple."" So begins the first story, ""Distant Stars."" Born in 1949, Le Minh Khue was no stranger to the vagaries of Land Reform politics and war. Colored by her stint as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Khue's level gaze lingers over the shambles of a war-torn country and its reconstruction to examine the soul of a people whose culture has all but been destroyed. The Stars, the Earth, the River contains an excellent introduction by the translators, grounding the stories in Le Minh Khue's personal history; the narrator of ""A Day on the Road"" speaks from having witnessedthe carnage of war. You simultaneously feel the rage of the author and the narrator when Khue disparagingly notes that the conversations around her center on luxuries, motor scooters, and business deals. Of what use, these stories ask, is such suffering? How can a culture honor the losses of war?

The Love You Promised Me is the 6th recipient of the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize, awarded annually at the Guadalajara International Book Fair for a work of fiction by a woman writer in the Spanish language. Marcela, the heroine of the novel, is a modern, professional woman in her forties sifting through her disappointment after a brief but intense, extra-marital affair. As the novel opens, Marcela is in the town of San Lazaro, the home town of her forebears, not only to pick up the pieces of her life, but also to discover the secret past of her parents. Set in Mexico in 1994, Mexico's last elections, the Mayan insurrection in Chiapas, and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio serve not only as backdrop, but they also parallel the emotional vicissitudes in Marcela's own life.

Open Gate is the first bilingual volume of Haitian Creole poetry published in English. Seven years in the making, this anthology is the result of the dedication of its editors and translators, Paul Laraque, Jack Hirschman and the Haitian poet Boadiba, as well as Max Manigat, one of the first teachers of Creole on the university level who was an invaluable advisor.The editors focus on contemporary Creole poetry that reflects the struggle for human rights in Haiti. The book is divided into three sections: Pioneers of Modern Haitian Creole poetry, beginning with the founder of modern Haitian Creole literature, Felix Morisseu-Leroy (19131998); the flowering of Haitian poetry as represented by the literary movement, ""Society of Butterflies,"" some of whose members were jailed or exiled by the bloody Duvalier dictatorship; and the New Generation featuring primrily those poets in the Diaspora whose work has been published in the last 15 years.

Maroon is the debut collection of Haitian-American poet Danielle Georges who writes of the pain of exile, the beauty of nature, and the delights of love in highly rhythmic, highly original language. The range of her voice is remarkable-from the comic to the tragic to the lyric, but always her poetry is electric with an overpowering zest for life and vitality of language.

What Night Brings focuses on a Chicano working-class family living in California during the 1960s. Marci-smart, feisty and funny-tells the story with the wisdom of someone twice her age as she determines to defy her family and God in order to find her identity, sexuality and freedom.""Carla Trujillo's What Night Brings puts one more wonderful Latina novelist on the must-read list right up there beside Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez and Cristina Garcia. This moving story, told in the completely convincing voice of its young protagonist, explores living with domestic abuse and longing for the maternal protection that always fails to materialize. We touch the mysteries of religion in a child's life, and are completely captivated by a young girl's budding lesbian identity. Character and situation building are exemplary, yet we are hit hard when the book takes its final turn. What Night Brings is a page-turner that lingers long after the last page has been turned.""-Margaret Randall""A story that is at once heartbreaking and hilarious, beautifully told by a wise and wise-cracking young girl.""-Sandra Cisneros

Line Break is the major work on poetry as social practice and a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary criticism or poetry. For many years, James Scully, along with others, quietly radicalized American poetry—in theory and in practice, in how it is lived as well as in how it is written. In eight provocative essays, James Scully argues provocatively for artistic and cultural practice that actively opposes structures of power too often reinforced by intellectual activities.

""What do I feel?"" asks the narrator, Nora García, 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.  Show More 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.

No president today is more controversial than Venezuela's Hugo Chávez Frías. Elected in a landslide in 1998, he promised a peaceful revolution. That peaceful dream became a nightmare when Chávez was overthrown in a coup d'état in 2002. Surprisingly, he was brought back to power by his supporters, mostly barrio dwellers, within forty-eight hours. Although Chávez continues to be dogged by controversy, he stays in power because of these supporters who see themselves as active participants in a democratic revolution.As a former Catholic priest who has lived in Venezuela for the past twenty years and spent eight of those years in a cardboard-and-tin shack in one of Caracas' barrios, Charles Hardy is in a unique position to explain what is taking place. Cowboy in Caracas: A North American's Memoir of Venezuela's Democratic Revolution gives the reader insight into the Venezuelan reality, using an anecdotal presentation drawn from the writer's personal experiences.

Beginning in Vietnam shortly after the end of the American war and ending sometime in the 21st century, this 8th volume of Curbstone's Voices from Vietnam Series follows the life of Nguyen Thi My Tiep, a woman writer and a revolutionary, whose girlhood is spent as a guerrilla fighter, and whose post-war life becomes a search for personal liberation and individual love. Tiep's struggles are seamlessly connected to the changes her country is going through, as Da Ngan's daring and controversial novel draws us into the life of a woman who insists on leading a meaningful and honest life--as a citizen, as a daughter, as a mother, as a writer, and as a lover who pursues her own sexuality.Da Ngan was born in 1952 in Can Tho, Vietnam, and served in the Southern Liberation Forces during the American War. She has written a number of novels and short story collections. An Insignificant Family won the prize for best fiction from the Union of Writers in Hanoi in 2005, and is Da Ngan's first novel in English to be published in the United StatesRosemary Nguyen 's work in literary translation includes an anthology of modern Vietnamese short stories, Literature News (Yale University Press), The Cemetery of Chua Village (Curbstone Press), and contributions to several other collections of short stories. She currently resides in Lake Stevens, Washington.

A Palestinian poet, Ibrahim Nasrallah is among the foremost poets of his generation. In this collection, Nasrallah describes the suffering of the Palestinians not through a personal lens, but through a universal context. He observes life with a natural human tendency toward a love that can heal, transcend, and transform the pain and sorrow of human experience.“Taste”There’s the dewy taste of seas and clouds in the dust,the taste of the expanse and the rain,of plains, mountains, humans,of feminity, love, and intrepid oranges,of childhood and saffron,of living in my mother’s heart,of travel,and of your soul and mine.But my beloved trees steal toward the sourceto taste it in solitude, before any of us

“This is Nobel-quality writing, an international author with a mature style telling a story to the peak of his capacity. The English language needs more of it.”—The TelegraphFrom the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, Wandering Star is the story of two young women, one uprooted by the Holocaust and the other by the founding of the state of Israel.  Bearing witness to the boundless strength of the spirit, and based on his own experience as a child in World War II, J.M.G. Le Clézio chronicles the saga of a young girl, Esther, who, in a small mountain village north of Nice occupied by Italian forces, learns what it means to be Jewish in wartime Europe. A quiet young teenager, she suffers the loss of her beloved father and, with her mother, is forced to flee advancing German troops.At war’s end, Esther and her mother make an arduous journey to Jerusalem, where their path crosses with a group of displaced refugees, including Nejma, a Palestinian girl whose story of life in the camps balances Esther’s own tale of suffering and survival. Esther and Nejma never meet again, but in their respective exiles, they are forever haunted by the memory of one another. Wandering Star is a powerful coming-of-age story and, as Le Figaro notes, truly “a luminous lesson in humanity.”

León, Nicaragua, 1907. During a tribute he delivers during his triumphal return to his native city, Rubén Darío writes on the fan of a little girl one of his most famous poems, "Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea."In 1956 in a cafe in León, a group of literati gather, dedicated, among other things, to the rigorous reconstruction of the legend surrounding Darío-but also to conspire. There will be an attempt against dictator Somoza's life, and that little girl with the fan a half-century before will not be a disinterested party.In Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, Sergio Ramírez encompasses, in a complete metaphor of reality and legend, the entire history of his country. The narrative moves along paths fifty years apart, which inevitably converge. The story becomes a fascinating exercise on the power of memory, on the influence of the past, fictitious or not, in the finality of reality.

Centralia Dead March is a documentary novel based on the struggle of a radical union to establish better working conditions and solidarity among lumbermen, miners, railroad and migrant workers during the early part of this century. Wesley Everest, Ray Becker, Bert and O.C. Bland, Loren Roberts and Eugene Barnett lived and worked around Centralia, Washington and were active in the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World. Because of its doctrine of worker unity, its stand against racist hiring practices and its call for militant tactics, the I.W.W., the most feared union among the ruling classes, was subject to massive arrests and numerous court actions. When the I.W.W. led the northwester woods out on strike during the First World War because wages had dropped while production increased, they were branded "traitors" in the local papers. On November 11, 1919, during the first Armistice parade, a mob of Centralia "patriots" raided the union hall. In the conflict, three soldiers were shot by workers defending their property; Everest was beaten, castrated, and hanged from a bridge; and seven workers - including Becker, the Blands, Roberts, and Barnett - were sentenced to from 25 to 40 years. Centralia Dead March recreates these historical events and examines the long-term consequences of the violence and repression.