Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> World Literature - Mexico

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...

This tale of a repressive priest and his small Mexican village during the eighteen months preceding the Revolution of 1910 is a great novel, one that exposes the struggle between human desire and paralyzing fear--fear of humanity, fear of nature, fear of the wrath of God. Agustin Yanez probes the actions of people caught in life's currents, enthralling his readers with mounting dramatic tension as he shows that no power can forge saints from the human masses, that any attempt to do so, in fact, often has exactly the opposite result.

Yanez brings to his work a deep understanding of...

Recognized in Mexico as one of the country's most important contemporary dramatists, Emilio Carballido has only recently become known in other countries through his plays and short stories. This translation introduces Carballido as a novelist. In The Norther what makes and breaks human relationships is his central interest as he traces the course of a relationship between a widow and a young man. The characters are created as their emotional and psychological outlines are drawn, and it is in the characterization that the hand of the dramatist is revealed. But it is...

Cristina, the young protagonist of Tree of Desire, and her little brother Joaquin run away from a home that is outwardly normal, but inwardly disfunctional. Lost on the streets of Mexico City, they confront some of the most terrifying aspects of city life. Or is it all a dream? The story suggests, without confirming, that sexual abuse has driven Cristina to her desperate escape. But is it an escape? Are they awakening from a dream, or reentering a nightmare?

Serafin, too, is lost in the city. Searching for his father who has deserted the family, he is virtually helpless...

From reviews of the Spanish edition:

Like waves ebbing and flowing, love surges and subsides among four friends who share a vacation at the house on the beach. As they navigate the seas of love and friendship, jealousy and unfaithfulness, Elena, Marta, Eduardo, and Rafael are swept up in the opposing currents that flow between security and personal freedom, marriage and sexual liberation, family and work, provincial and city life, and traditional and unconventional gender roles.

This deceptively simple novel, published in Mexico in 1966 as La casa en la playa and here translated into English for the first...

Nellie Campobello, a prominent Mexican writer and "novelist of the Revolution," played an important role in Mexico's cultural renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s, along with such writers as Rafael Munoz and Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes and artists Diego Rivera, Orozco, and others. Her two novellas, Cartucho (first published in 1931) and My Mother's Hands (first published as Las manos de Mama in 1938), are autobiographical evocations of a childhood spent amidst the violence and turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico. Campobello's memories of the...

What was it that flew over with such a terrifying roar? Was it, as many said, the devil, or was it that thing a few had heard of, a flying machine? And those electric lights at Jacob Gallo's farm, were they witchcraft or were they science?

The theme of this harshly powerful novel is the impact of modern technology and ideas on a few isolated, tradition-bound hamlets in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The old ways are represented by Epifanio Trujillo, the cacique of the region, now ailing and losing his grip on things; by ancient Madre Matiana, the region's midwife,...