Castellanos Moya'sSenselessness was acclaimed "an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art" (Village Voice) and "a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials" (Russell Banks).

The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya s ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez known as the Warlock who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944, failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. Tyrant Memory takes place during the month between the coup and the strike. Its protagonist, Haydee Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing the dictator s death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to flee when...

Daily conversations in outdoor cafes with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera s goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, distress, and incipient madness. The two men s uneasiness soon becomes a nightmare as the TV adventure advances with a real-life plot involving a mutant strain of killer algae to take over the world The Conversations, a reality within a fiction within a parallel reality, is hilariously funny and...

One Saturday night a bankrupt bachelor in his sixties and his mother dine with a wealthy friend. They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors. They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old windup toys and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about...