Regina Rheda is a contemporary award-winning Brazilian writer whose original voice and style have won her many admirers. First World Third Class and Other Tales of the Global Mix presents some of her finest and most representative work to an English-speaking readership. Stories from the Copan Building consists of eight tales set in a famous residential building in Sao Paulo. The stories, like the apartment complex, are a microcosm of modern-day urban Brazil. They are witty, consistently caustic, and never predictable.

Also in this volume is the poignant and...

Lost in a shipwreck in 1895, rewritten before the author's suicide in 1896, and not published until 1925, Jose Asuncion Silva's After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa) is one of Latin America's finest fin de siecle novels and the first one to be translated into English. Perhaps the single best work for understanding turn-of-the-twentieth-century writing in South America, After-Dinner Conversation is also cited as the continent's first psychological novel and an outstanding example of modernista fiction and the Decadent...

In an unnamed town in the Ecuadorian Andes, a small wooden icon--La Virgen Pipona (the Potbellied Virgin)--conceals the documents that define the town's social history. That history recently has been dominated by the women of the Benavides family, a conservative clan and, not coincidentally, the caretakers of the Virgin. Their rivals are the Pandos, a family led by four old men who spend their days smoking in the park across from the Virgin's cathedral and offering revisionist versions of local and national events. When a military skirmish threatens the Virgin (and the secret in her famous...

The astonishing talent of Argentine women writers belies the struggles they have faced--not merely as overlooked authors, but as women of conviction facing oppression. The patriarchal pressures of the Peron years, the terror of the Dirty War, and, more recently, the economic collapse that gripped the nation in 2001 created such repressive conditions that some writers, such as Luisa Valenzuela, left the country for long periods. Not surprisingly, power has become an inescapable theme in Argentine women's fiction, and this collection shows how the dynamics of power capture not only the...

Professor Juan Manuel Barrientos prefers footsteps to footnotes. Fighting a hangover, he manages to keep his appointment to lead a group of students on a walking lecture among the historic buildings of downtown Mexico City. When the students fail to show up, however, he undertakes a solo tour that includes more cantinas than cathedrals. Unable to resist either alcohol itself or the introspection it inspires, Professor Barrientos muddles his personal past with his historic surroundings, setting up an inevitable conclusion in the very center of Mexico City.

First published in Mexico in...