The Last Days of El Comandante

The Last Days of El Comandante

Author: Alberto Barrera Tyszka

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1477316574

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Winner of the Tusquets prize in 2015 and previously translated into French, German, Dutch, Polish, and Portuguese, Alberto Barrera Tyszka's Patria o muerte is now available in English.


The Last Days of El Comandante

The Last Days of El Comandante

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 9781477321034

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"Alberto Barrera Tyszka's Patria o muerte is a thriller set at the time of Hugo Chávez's impending death and the frenzy that it sets off in Venezuela. The retired oncologist Miguel Sanabria lives on edge, and his skepticism about the diagnosis of Chávez's illness seems to put him at odds with the world around him, which is becoming increasingly combustible. Sanabria's extremist anti-Chávez wife threatens to act unwisely, and his nephew Vladimir arrives from Cuba with a secret recording of Chávez's voice and asks that his uncle conceal it--a life-threatening promise. His neighbor Fredy Lacuna, an unemployed journalist, is desperate for money and takes on a job writing and investigating Chávez's health condition. Lacuna leaves for Cuba while his wife, unbeknown to him, is pressured to leave their rented apartment by the owner. In a nearby neighborhood, a ten-year-old girl pretends all is normal, though she has been living on her own after her mother was shot dead outside their home. Her only contact to the world is a boy she regularly messages online"--


Animals at the End of the World

Animals at the End of the World

Author: Gloria Susana Esquivel

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1477320164

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Animals at the End of the World begins with an explosion, which six-year-old Inés mistakes for the end of the world that she has long feared. In the midst of the chaos, she meets the maid’s granddaughter, Mariá, who becomes her best friend and with whom she navigates the adult world in her grandparents’ confined house. Together, they escape the house and confront the “animals” that populate Bogotá in the 1980s. But Inés soon realizes she cannot count on either María or her preoccupied and conflicted parents. Alone, she must learn to decipher her outer and inner worlds, confronting both armies of beasts and episodes of domestic chaos. In the process, she also learns what it means to test boundaries, break rules, and cope with the consequences. The first novel by Colombian author Gloria Susana Esquivel, Animals at the End of the World is a poetic and moving coming-of-age story that lingers long after its final page.


Fidel's Last Days

Fidel's Last Days

Author: Roland Merullo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1400032563

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A clandestine scheme to assassinate Fidel Castro spirals into paranoia, betrayal, and deceit in this dazzling thriller. Former CIA agent Carolina Perez has spent five years working deep undercover with a singular goal: to take down Castro and free Cuba from his troubled presence. Across the Straits in Havana, Carlos Gutierrez is Castro’s minister of health and a member of his inner circle. Carlos has also been convinced to overthrow el Comandante, at great risk to himself and those he loves. But the indestructible dictator is surrounded by more than just the D-7 secret police: A Byzantine network of spies, double agents, and informants means nobody is who they seem. A thrill ride through Miami and Havana, Fidel’s Last Days sizzles with tension until the final word.


Daughter of the Tigris

Daughter of the Tigris

Author: Muhsin Al-Ramli

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Published: 2019-11-14

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0857056832

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The follow-up to the internationally acclaimed The President's Gardens "Al-Ramli is a remarkable storyteller, and in Daughter of the Tigris he creates a dynamic, intricately plotted narrative, brimming with stories and a host of memorable characters" Susannah Tarbush, Banipal On the sixth day of Ramadan, in a land without bananas, Qisma leaves for Baghdad with her husband-to-be to find the body of her father. But in the bloodiest year of a bloody war, how will she find one body among thousands? For Tariq, this is more than just a marriage of convenience: the beautiful, urbane Qisma must be his, body and soul. But can a sheikh steeped in genteel tradition share a tranquil bed with a modern Iraqi woman? The President has been deposed, and the garden of Iraq is full of presidents who will stop at nothing to take his place. Qisma is afraid - afraid for her son, afraid that it is only a matter of time before her father's murderers come for her. The only way to survive is to take a slice of Iraq for herself. But ambition is the most dangerous drug of all, and it could just seal Qisma's fate. Translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren REVIEWS FOR THE PRESIDENT'S GARDENS 'Though firmly rooted in its context, The President's Gardens' concerns are universal. It is a profoundly moving investigation of love, death and injustice, and an affirmation of the importance of dignity, friendship and meaning amid oppression. Its light touch and persistent humour make it an enormous pleasure to read' Robin Yassin-Kassab, Guardian. The President's Gardens evokes the fantastical, small town feel of One Hundred Years of Solitude Tom Gordon, Financial Times 'No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting' Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize


The Wind Traveler

The Wind Traveler

Author: Alonso Cueto

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1477317740

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A Peruvian literary master returns with a provocative novel about the intersection of retribution and reconciliation--and a soldier's quest to confront the ghosts of his past after the Shining Path's reign of terror has ended.


The Snares of Memory

The Snares of Memory

Author: Juan Marsé

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Published: 2019-09-19

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0857058770

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In January 1949 on an otherwise unremarkable day in an unremarkable Barcelona neighbourhood cinema, a prostitute is murdered in cold blood in the projection booth by the assistant projectionist, one Fermín Sicart. More than thirty years later, a screenwriter resolves to determine the truth behind her murder, and seeks out Fermin, who has served his time. But though Fermin remembers killing his victim, and exactly how he did it, he cannot for the life of him recall why. The Snares of Memory, by one of the great Spanish men of letters, is at once an investigation of memory, motive and murder and a pointed dig at the Spanish film industry of the second half of the twentieth century.


Echoes of the City

Echoes of the City

Author: Lars Saabye Christensen

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Published: 2019-10-03

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0857059173

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A jewel of modern Norwegian literature now hailed as Lars Saabye Christensen's crowning achievement - an intricate and utterly compelling narrative. "With its tonal nuance and quietly amusing melancholy, Echoes of the City confirms him as one of Norway's finest writers" Guardian "[A] profoundly resonant novel" T.L.S. Christensen is one of Scandinavia's finest and most celebrated storytellers, who has devoted the best part of his career to writing about the city of his birth. As Oslo slowly emerges from a period of crippling austerity, Echoes of the City shows how small, almost imperceptible acts of kindness and compassion, and tiny shifts in fortune, can change the lives of many. At the centre of the novel are Maj and Ewald Kristoffersen and their son Jesper, their lives closely entwined and overlapping with their neighbours' on Kirkeveien. When the butcher's son Jostein is knocked down in a traffic accident and loses his hearing, Jesper promises to be his ears in the world. The arrival of a long-awaited telephone is a major event for Maj and Ewald, and meanwhile their neighbour, recently widowed Fru Vik, tentatively takes up with the owner of the bookshop near the cemetery. The bar at Hotel Bristol becomes a meeting place for all of them - for Ewald and his advertising colleagues, for Fru Vik and her suitor, to the piano playing of hapless Enzo Zanetti, an immigrant down on his luck, who enables Jesper to discover his true passion. The minutes of the local Red Cross meetings give an architecture to the narrative of so many lives and tell a story in themselves, bearing witness to the steady recovery of the community. Echoes of the City is a remarkably tender observation of the rhythms and passions of a city, and a particular salute to the resilience of its women. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett


Comandante

Comandante

Author: Rory Carroll

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0143124889

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Describes the leadership of Venezuela's elected president, Hugo Chávez, and his efforts to transform his country and paints a picture of his life based on interviews with ministers, aides, courtiers, and everyday citizens.


Forms of Dictatorship

Forms of Dictatorship

Author: Jennifer Harford Vargas

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0190642858

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An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new sub-genre of Latina/o fiction, which the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os' central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how Latina/o writers with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what Harford Vargas terms a "Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary" that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. Focusing on novels by writers such as Junot D az, H ctor Tobar, Cristina Garc a, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman, the book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground more ubiquitous modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the U.S., as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. Harford Vargas simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. In building on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective, Harford Vargas explores how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. Forms of Dictatorship thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form --- that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.