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...