The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is a sweeping historical novel of Mexico during the short, tragic, at times surreal, reign of Emperor Maximilian and his court. Even as the American Civil War raged north of the border, a clique of Mexican conservative exiles and clergy convinced Louis Napoleon to invade Mexico and install the Archduke of Austria, Maximilian von Habsburg, as Emperor. A year later, the childless Maximilian took custody of the two year old, half-American, Prince Agustìn...

This anthology gathers the strong voices of accomplished poets reaching into and beyond nostalgia to remember, to honor, and to document through figurative imagery their experiences of Mexico and the vibrant border areas before the ravages of narco-violence.Locals Listen to the Mariachi Band at El Jardin in San MiguelYou see their silhouettes along the stone wallor arm in arm below the glow of garden lightshuddled like foothills, earth you coul...

These stories offer layered, perceptive takes on what home means to us. The people we meet in these stories are often traveling to and from home—thinking about where they have come from, where they are headed, and how that journey will impact their futures. Although the stories approach homecoming and homesickness through varied moods and styles, they all come around to confronting a shared need: a place to call home.

Front porches, family cars, playgrounds, swimming pools: from such familiar haunts of childhood, these stories look out on the world through young eyes and hearts. Wise beyond their years—or soon to be—Ruthie, Omar, J.J., and the other kids in these stories veer in and out of touching distance to hard lessons about trust, love, and mortality. However engaged or aloof, grownups are always nearby. Far-from-perfect emissaries to the realm of adulthood, they pose questions for children even as...

Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author's death in 2003, The Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño's last, unfinished novel. The novel follows Amalfitano—an exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter—as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. This border town is haunted by dark tales of murdered women and populated by characters such as...

From the Nobel Prize-winning author: "A capacious, funny, threatening novel" of wandering souls and political upheaval in 1930s Portugal ( The New York Times Book Review) .The year is 1936, and the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar is establishing himself in Portugal, edging his country toward civil war. At the same time, Dr. Ricardo Reis has returned home to Lisbon after a long sojou...

At the ancient, doddering age of thirty, it's long past time Prince Amador married, at least according to his domineering family. Determined to see the matter attended at last, they have issued an ultimatum: find a betrothed before the year is out, or he'll be sent off to marry Prince Ottokar, Crown Prince of their oldest enemy, a man Amador has hated and feared for nearly all his life.Desperate to avoid that fate, he has one last chance: to win the affections of Prince Nazaire, wh...

The New York Times hails Barbara Hambly’s novels featuring Benjamin January as “masterly,” “ravishing,” and “haunting.” The Chicago Tribune crowns them “dazzling…January is a wonderfully rich and complex character.” Now the bestselling author returns with a story that leads January from the dangerously sensual milieu of New Orleans into a world seething with superstition and dark spirits, where one man’s freedom turns on a case of murder and blood vengeance.

A "colorful family saga" set against the dramatic historical backdrop of twentieth-century Puerto Rico, from an author nominated for the National Book Award ( Kirkus Reviews).Elvira Vernet narrates Eccentric Neighborhoods as she attempts to solve the mystery of who her parents truly are. Her mother, the beautiful and aristocratic Clarissa Rivas de Santillana, was born into a rarefied world of privilege, one of five daughters on the family's sugar p...

“Complete Stories, a collection of Carrington’s published and unpublished short stories—many newly translated from their original French and Spanish—is a terrific introduction to her bizarre, dreamlike worlds.” —Carmen Maria Machado, NPRSurrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these...

At the ancient, doddering age of thirty, it's long past time Prince Amador married, at least according to his domineering family. Determined to see the matter attended at last, they have issued an ultimatum: find a betrothed before the year is out, or he'll be sent off to marry Prince Ottokar, Crown Prince of their oldest enemy, a man Amador has hated and feared for nearly all his life.Desperate to avoid that fate, he has one last chance: to win the affections of Prince Nazaire, wh...

The Nobel Prize–winning author of Blindness recalls the days of his youth in Lisbon and the Portuguese countryside in this charming memoir.José Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside world, but a fount of knowledge,...