This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of Castaways (Naufragios), Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernan Cortes.

In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native peoples along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving...

An early cameo of Latin American surrealism, Rosamel del Valle's erotic narrative of ecstasy and perdition creates the rhythm of the dream and the tempo of madness. Intermittently a waiflike young woman, Eva, intrudes into the daily routine of the writer. Her appearances are marked by a circle of red and the vision of a deep well with a star hanging over it. A tone poem of surrealist encounter, pursuit, and loss, Eva y la Fuga was written in 1930 and finally published posthumously in 1970, by Monte Avila Press in Venezuela. Anna Balakian offers here the first translation of the work...

In this first comprehensive study of Latin America's literary vanguards of the 1920s and 1930s, Vicky Unruh explores the movement's provocative and polemic nature. Latin American vanguardism--a precursor to the widely acclaimed work of contemporary Latin American writers--was stimulated by the European avant-garde movements of the World War I era. But as Unruh's wide-ranging study attests, the vanguards of Latin America--emerging from the continent's own historical circumstances--developed a very distinct character and voice.

Through manifestos, experimental texts, and ribald public...