Maya: Three actors, including the delectable and perpetually innocent Virgin White, are abandoned on a film set - which may be on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, in Vietnam, or even Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. Ethiopian Exhibition: A town in Ethiopia pretends to be the Mexican resort of Puerto Vallarta, thus earning valuable dollars from hordes of American tourists. Queen of Law Vegas: Elsewhere - high in the mountains of Central Mexicao - a down-on-his-luck film director prepares to make a pornographic film, using an imitation Law Vegas made out of papier-mache.
ONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED BOOKS OF THE YEAR Contains an excerpt from Don Winslow’s explosive new novel, City on Fire! NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Washington Post • NPR • Financial Times • The Guardian • Booklist • New Statesman • Daily Telegraph • Irish Times • Dallas Morning News • Sunday Times • New York Post "A big, sprawling, ultimately stunning crime tableau." – Janet Maslin, New York Times "You can't ask for more emotionally moving entertainment." – Stephen King "One of the best thriller writers on the planet." – Esquire The explosive, highly anticipated conclusion to the epic Cartel trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Force What do you do when there are no borders? When the lines you thought existed simply vanish? How do you plant your feet to make a stand when you no longer know what side you’re on? The war has come home. For over forty years, Art Keller has been on the front lines of America’s longest conflict: The War on Drugs. His obsession to defeat the world’s most powerful, wealthy, and lethal kingpin?the godfather of the Sinaloa Cartel, Adán Barrera?has left him bloody and scarred, cost him the people he loves, even taken a piece of his soul. Now Keller is elevated to the highest ranks of the DEA, only to find that in destroying one monster he has created thirty more that are wreaking even more chaos and suffering in his beloved Mexico. But not just there. Barrera’s final legacy is the heroin epidemic scourging America. Throwing himself into the gap to stem the deadly flow, Keller finds himself surrounded by enemies?men who want to kill him, politicians who want to destroy him, and worse, the unimaginable?an incoming administration that’s in bed with the very drug traffickers that Keller is trying to bring down. Art Keller is at war with not only the cartels, but with his own government. And the long fight has taught him more than he ever imagined. Now, he learns the final lesson?there are no borders. In a story that moves from deserts of Mexico to Wall Street, from the slums of Guatemala to the marbled corridors of Washington, D.C., Winslow follows a new generation of narcos, the cops who fight them, street traffickers, addicts, politicians, money-launderers, real-estate moguls, and mere children fleeing the violence for the chance of a life in a new country. A shattering tale of vengeance, violence, corruption and justice, this last novel in Don Winslow’s magnificent, award-winning, internationally bestselling trilogy is packed with unforgettable, drawn-from-the-headlines scenes. Shocking in its brutality, raw in its humanity, The Border is an unflinching portrait of modern America, a story of—and for—our time.
Captain Benjamin Nyman Vizcarra, son of the wealthiest man in Mexico, has everything a young man could want. But in the days leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, he finds himself questioning whether he can support the old regime--and more and more distracted by his brother's bewitching fiancee, Isabel. Accused and convicted of his father's murder after a fateful late-night encounter, Benjamin relives the events that led to his imprisonment. As he plots escape, a new question begins to form: will he run, or will he stay to confront his mistakes and win back the woman he loves? -- back cover.
Beautiful and brutal, two young cowboys come of age in The Border Trilogy – Cormac McCarthy's award-winning requiem for the American frontier. 'A landmark in American literature' – Guardian With an introduction from Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room. During the middle of the twentieth century, two teenage boys leave their childhoods behind across the US-Mexico border. John Grady Cole will search for his future to the south, a friend by his side, finding adventure and barbarism in the vanishing world of the Old West. Billy Parnham, after deciding not to kill her, will be drawn to the mountains of Mexico accompanied by a lone, pregnant wolf. When the two boys come together as men, in the trilogy's final volume, a dangerous chain of events will bring this story to its savage, inevitable conclusion. A stunning saga of loyalty and love, filled equally with sorrow and humour, The Border Trilogy is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood and violence are conditions of life. 'In these three fierce, desolate, beautiful novels, McCarthy has created a masterpiece' – Sunday Times This edition collects all three novels in the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. Praise for Cormac McCarthy ‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren 'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' – Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series '[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain
Spanning forty years, the second book in John Nichols's New Mexico trilogy, The Magic Journey, tells the tale of how relentless progress transformed a rural backwater into a boomtown. Boom times came to the forgotten little southwestern town of Chamisaville just as the rest of America was in the Great Depression. They came when a rattletrap bus loaded with stolen dynamite blew sky-high, leaving behind a giant gushing hot spring. Within minutes, the town's wheeler-dealers had organized, and within a year, Chamisaville was flooded with tourists and pilgrims, and the wheeler-dealers were rich. At first, it was a magic time for Chamisaville—almost as if every day were a holiday. But the euphoria gradually dissipated, and the land-hungry developers, speculators, and interlopers moved in. Finally, the day came when Chamisaville's people found themselves all but displaced, their children no longer heirs to their land or their tradition. With mounting intensity, The Magic Journey reaches a climax that is tragically foreordained. A sensitive, vital, and honest chronicle of life in America's Southwest, it is also an incisive commentary on what America has become on its road to progress. The Magic Journey is part of John Nichols's New Mexico trilogy, which includes The Milagro Beanfield War and The Nirvana Blues.
Jack Tartarus, a photographer, has returned to his family’s house on Crab, an island off the east coast of Vancouver Island. After mulling it over for ten years, Jack has decided to tear his family’s house down, board-by-board, just as his father built it up. He purchases a wrecking bar. Struggling with the first piece of siding, his wrecking bar jammed between ancient planks, it seems the house is determined to remain. The people on Crab Island are also angrily opposed to his plan—including his responsible sister, his self-centered niece, a beautiful woman he knew intimately long ago, and Turtle, the hardware store clerk and the island’s self-proclaimed guardian. In a story about families and family history, Jack’s calculated plans for demolition are fired by the memory of his parents and the other losses he has felt. Like the others who have retreated to Crab Island, Jack has come to a place where he must make peace with the house, in order to construct his future.
Frederick Aldama’s The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez (2014) was the first full-scale study of one of the most prolific and significant Latino directors making films today. In this companion volume, Aldama enlists a corps of experts to analyze a majority of Rodriguez’s feature films, from his first break-out success El Mariachi in 1992 to Machete in 2010. The essays explore the formal and thematic features present in his films from the perspectives of industry (context, convention, and distribution), the film blueprint (auditory and visual ingredients), and consumption (ideal and real audiences). The authors illuminate the manifold ways in which Rodriguez’s films operate internally (plot, character, and event) and externally (audience perception, thought, and feeling). The volume is divided into three parts: “Matters of Mind and Media” includes essays that use psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology to shed light on how Rodriguez’s films complicate Latino identity, as well as how they succeed in remaking audiences’ preconceptions of the world. “Narrative Theory, Cognitive Science, and Sin City: A Case Study” offers tools and models of analysis for the study of Rodriguez’s film re-creation of a comic book (on which Frank Miller was credited as codirector). “Aesthetic and Ontological Border Crossings and Borderlands” considers how Rodriguez’s films innovatively critique fixed notions of Latino identity and experience, as well as open eyes to racial injustices. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how Rodriguez’s career offers critical insights into the filmmaking industry, the creative process, and the consuming and reception of contemporary film.
This book presents papers by eleven European scholars that explore the ambivalent representations of an American West that follows “no single trajectory, creating instead a series of lines and rhythms, always moving, crossing, and folding” (Neil Campbell). The papers explore the use of the American West as an ideal or a realistic setting in different cultural productions, ranging from music (“Sing-along Melodies of the West”) to film (“Western Images in Motion”) or comics (“Graphic Representations of the American West”), and including popular cultural fields like podcasts, fashion, and gastronomy (“Performing the West”).
