Stephen Henighan, a Romanian grammar book and hours of language tapes under his belt, billets with a family as an English teacher in Moldova, a country born from the dismantling of Romania during World War II. As a Westerner in this -lost province- and former Soviet republic, Henighan feels he's an unnerving disappointment for many Moldovans, especially to the MTV-addicted, twenty-year-old Andrei.

Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), the first Spanish-American prose writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is both a pivotal and a representative figure in the development of the twentieth-century Spanish-American novel. His literary apprenyiceship in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s is arguably the most crucial and the least understood period of his career. In forging his definitions of Guatemalan cultural identity and Spanish-American modernity from a French vantage point, he made literary innovations and generated cultural paradoxes which have proved central tosubsequent...

Luanda, Angola, 1990. Ndalu is a normal twelve-year old boy in an extraordinary time and place. Like his friends, he enjoys laughing at his teachers, avoiding homework and telling tall tales. But Ndalu's teachers are Cuban, his homework assignments include writing essays on the role of the workers and peasants, and the tall tales he and his friends tell are about a criminal gang called Empty Crate which specializes in attacking schools. Ndalu is mystified by the family servant, Comrade Antonio, who thinks that Angola worked better when it was a colony of Portugal, and by his Aunt Dada, who...