Don Catrín de la Fachenda, here translated into English for the first time, is a picaresque novel by the Mexican writer José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827), best known as the author of El Periquillo Sarniento (The Itching Parrot), often called the first Latin American novel. Don Catrín is three things at once: a rakish pícaro in the tradition of the picaresque; a catrín, a dandy or fop; and a criollo, a person born in the New ...

“These brief Ficciones have to be read one at a time, and slowly; then they throb with uncanny and haunting power.” —The Atlantic MonthlyThe seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century.Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sph...

**"One of the wittiest, most playful, and . . . most alive and ageless books ever written." --Dave Eggers, The New YorkerA revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the AmericasA Penguin Classic**The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature, who has been championed by the likes of Philip Roth, Susan Sonta...

"A palm tree, seeing me troubled and divining the cause, murmured in its branches that there was nothing wrong with fifteen-year old boys getting into corners with girls of fourteen; quite the contrary, youths of that age have no other function, and corners were made for that very purpose. It was an old palm-tree, and I believed in old palm-trees even more than in old books. Birds, butterflies, a cricket trying out its summer song, all the living things of the air were of the same opinion....

"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. But while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half...

A classic work of literature by “the greatest author ever produced in Latin America.” (Susan Sontag)Brilliant physician Simão Bacamarte sacrifices a prestigious career to return home and dedicate himself to the budding field of psychology. Bacamarte opens the first asylum in Brazil hoping to crown himself and his hometown with “imperishable laurels.” But the doctor begins to see signs of insanity in more and more of his neighbors. . . .With dark humor and s...

Jose Rizal is the national hero of The Philippines. The First Filipino is the award-winning biography. It was awarded the first prize in the Rizal Centennial biography competition. The author is Ambassador Leon Ma. Guerrero, who also translated the widely-acclaimed translations of Rizal's novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.Painstakingly researched and referenced, this is a standard text in Rizal studies and has been continuously in print since its first publication in 1962.

Robert Hughes, who has stunned us with comprehensive works on subjects as sweeping and complex as the history of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the modern art movement (The Shock of the New), the nature of American art (American Visions), and the nature of America itself as seen through its art (The Culture of Complaint), now turns his renowned critical eye to one of art history’s most compelling, enigmatic, and important fi...

Ostensibly a biography of the gaucho barbarian Juan Facundo Quiroga, Facundo is also a complex, passionate work of history, sociology, and political commentary, and Latin America's most important essay of the nineteenth century. It is a study of the Argentine character, a prescription for the modernization of Latin America, and a protest against the tyranny of the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1835–1852). The book brings nineteenth-century Latin American history to life even...

New York Times Critics’ Best of the YearA landmark event, the complete stories of Machado de Assis finally appear in English for the first time in this extraordinary new translation.Widely acclaimed as the progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Machado de Assis (1839–1908)—the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, and the grandson of freed slaves—was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil’s greatest writer. His prod...

Augusto Monterroso is widely known for short stories characterized by brilliant satire and wit. Yet behind scathing allusions to the weaknesses and defects of the artistic and intellectual worlds, they show his generous and expansive sense of compassion.This book brings together for the first time in English the volumes Complete Works (and Other Stories) (Obras completas [y otros cuentos] 1959) and Perpetual Motion (Movimiento perpetuo 1972). Together, they reveal...

A Pocket Mirror for Heroes is a mirror because it reflects "the person you are or the one you ought to be." It is a pocket mirror because its author took the time to be brief. And it is a mirror for heroes because it provides a vivid image of ethical and moral perfection to which all can aspire. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian was all but forgotten for three hundred years, until its republication in 1992 turned this lost classic into a New York Times