Non Magic Realist Latinamerican Literature
Discover essential Latin American literature beyond magic realism, featuring Borges' Collected Fictions, Roberto Arlt's The Seven Madmen, and more curated works in this compelling reading list.
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The Seven Madmen
by Roberto Arlt
First published in 1929, The Seven Madmen perfectly captures the conflict of Argentine society, at a crucial moment in its history. Arlt's exploration of the still mysterious city of Buenos Aires, its street slang, crowded tenements, crazy juxtapositions, and anguish are at the core of this novel. In this seething, hostile city, Erdosain wanders the streets, trying to decipher the teeming life going on behind dark doors. He searches, literarally, for his soul that is causing him so much pain, wondering what it might look like. This translation of Arlt's masterpiece makes available to English speaking audiences the work of a writer who is the founder of the contemporary Latin American novel and a giant of 20th century literature.
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Collected Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called âthe greatest Spanish-language writer of our centuryâ collected in a single volume âAn event, and cause for celebration.ââThe New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short storyâfrom his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeareâs MemoryâJorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borgesâs magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the masterâs work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Selected Non-Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism The first comprehensive selection in any language of the non-fiction--much of it appearing here in English for the first time--of âone of literatureâs most fertile and original mindsâ (San Francisco Chronicle) A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper It will come as a surprise to many readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borgesâs extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and cultureâthough revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest workâhave scarcely been translated into English. Selected Non-Fictions presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers. Here is the dazzling metaphysician speculating on the nature of time and reality and the inventions of heaven and hell, and the almost superhumanly erudite reader of the worldâs literatures, from Homer to Ray Bradbury, James Joyce to Lady Murasaki. Here, too, the political Borges, taking courageous stands against fascism, antisemitism, and the PerĂłn dictatorship; Borges the movie critic, on King Kong and Citizen Kane and the Borgesian art of dubbing; and Borges the regular columnist for the Argentine equivalent of the Ladiesâ Home Journal, writing hilarious book reviews and capsule biographies of modern writers. Like the Aleph in his famous storyâthe magical point in a basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the worldâBorgesâs non-fictions are a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen, Shakespeare and the Kabbalah, the history of angels and the history of tango, the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints. Selected Non-Fictions presents more than 160 of these astonishing writings, from his youthful manifestos to his last meditations on his favorite books. More than a hundred of these pieces have never before appeared in English, and all have been rendered in brilliant new translations by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. This unique selection presents Borges as at once a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe that is an indispensable guide to Borges. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry
by Stephen Tapscott
"Large anthology includes work by 58 poets. Extensive, but general, introduction. Poets arranged chronologically from Josâe Martâi to Marjorie Agosâin. Volume includes few surprises and relatively few women. Bilingual format. Many translators; great fluctuation in quality. For detailed discussion of translations, see Charles Tomlinson in Times Literary Supplement, May 9, 1997; and Eliot Weinberger in Sulfur, 40, Spring 1997"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
