Americas – serie

This is the exuberant, often wryly comic, first-person account of a young Englishman's imprudent adventures, set against a background of political strife in 19th-century Uruguay.

Set in a Brazilian locale, this is the story of Pedro Archanjo, beloved rogue and fierce activist for social justice, who becomes a posthumous hero when an American intellect ""discovers"" his writings. The story flits between Archanjo's lifetime and that of the American professor decades later.

Banished for promiscuity, Tieta returns to the seaside village of Agreste after twenty-six years. Thinking she is now a rich, respectable widow, her mercenary family welcomes her with open arms. But Tieta is forced to reveal her true identity in order to save the town's beautiful beaches from ugly development. For the only way she can stop the factory is to call upon her close connections in Sao Paulo's highest political and financial circles—as only the Madam of the city's ritziest bordello can.

A classic of world literature back in print in a Spanish-language edition.Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America.

Set in strife-torn Guatemala City in the early 1980s, this sophisticated, quasi-comedic tale depicts the decline and near-fall of a prominent Guatemalan Jewish family.

The extraordinary Muna Lee was a brilliant writer, lyric poet, translator, diplomat, feminist and rights activist, and, above all, a Pan-Americanist. During the twentieth century, she helped shape the literary and social landscapes of the Americas. This is the first biography of her remarkable life and a collection of her diverse writings, which embody her vision of Pan America, an old concept that remains meaningful today.

San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture. In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodriguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flaneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. ""In Puerto Rico,"" he muses, ""life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks."" Through this book - available here in English for the first time - Rodriguez Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.

Approaching midlife, after rising to comfortable suburban life, Edgar Bonjour becomes involved with a drug-trafficking Puerto Rican motorcycle gang from his old neighbourhood and is brought down by an affair with a woman in the gang. News of his murder leads to introspection among other members of the Puerto Rican Bonjour clan, all descended from three now nameless French brothers remembered only by their surname. Though extended generations of the Bonjours dispersed, some settling in New York, they remain connected by the shared lore of their ancestry, that starting with the three original Bonjour brothers—all rampant adulterers—every descendent Bonjour male carries a reckless, womanizing gene.Interconnected like the Bonjour family itself, this novel is a tale of unpredictable and unforgettable characters that transports readers to a plane where ethnicity becomes universality.

Lavinia is accomplished, independent, and fiercely modern. She is also sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being. Then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and finds the courage to act.

in 1916, just before the russian revolution, Benjamin Kantarovitch, nicknamed "Mousy," has been asked by a sick friend to deliver a message to an agent in Prague. Believing he was undertaking an important mission under direct orders by Leon Trotsky, Mousy has left his shtetl near Odessa and traveled to revolutionary Prague to rendezvous with a secret agent. But on the way, Mousy loses the envelope containing the name of the agent he is supposed to meet. In Prague, Mousy mistakenly meets Franz Kafka, who in turn mistakes Mousy for an employee of a literary magazine. Kafka gives him a text, the parable of Kafka's leopards, to be published. Mousy misreads the parable as a secret message and a call to revolution. His imagined mission fails, and he returns to his village. Years later, after immigrating to Brazil with his entire family, Mousy is tapped for the second great mission in his life—and a second round of misinterpretations takes place. At the height of right-wing repression around the time of the 1964 Brazilian coup, Mousy gives his fugitive nephew Kafka's aphorism and tells him to sell it to an antiquarian dealer in Saõ Paulo. When the federal police stop to interrogate Mousy's nephew, they discover the text on his person and arrest him under suspicion of bearing a revolutionary message in code. Mousy must now save his unfortunate nephew from prison and redeem his previous misreading of Kafka's text.