Literary Realism

In these 12 masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.

The enchanted place is an ancient stone prison, viewed through the eyes of a death row inmate who finds escape in his books and in re-imagining life around him, weaving a fantastical story of the people he observes and the world he inhabits. Fearful and reclusive, he senses what others cannot. Though bars confine him every minute of every day, he marries visions of golden horses running beneath the prison, heat flowing like molten metal from their backs with the devastating violence of prison life.

On a hot, insomniac night at the Hotel Metropol, the novelist Carlos Fuentes steps onto his balcony only to find another man on the balcony next door. The other man asks for news of the social strife turning into revolution in the unnamed city below them. He reveals himself as the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, permitted to revisit Earth once a year for 24 hours based on his theory of eternal return.

Beck and Vivian never could stand each other, but they always tried their best for their mutual friend, Cassie. After the town moves on from Cassie’s murder too fast, Beck and Vivian finally find common ground: vengeance. They memorialize Cassie by secretly painting murals of her around town, a message to the world that Cassie won’t be forgotten. But Beck and Vivian are keeping secrets, like the third passenger riding in Beck’s VW bus with them - Cassie’s ghost.

En el prólogo de estos Doce cuentos peregrinos, García Márquez nos regala su explicación de por qué doce, por qué cuentos y por qué peregrinos. En Barcelona, una prostituta que va entrando en la vejez entrena a su perro para llorar ante la tumba que ha escogido para sí misma. En Viena, una mujer se vale de su don de ver el futuro para convertirse en la adivina de una familia rica.

There is the beautiful, elusive Elisabet who cuts a surprisingly svelte path at The Knitting Company. Neighbors Kristin and Kjartan who seem…normal, but for their explosive passion that bewilders even themselves (and ignites the spectacular revenge of Kjartan’s wife). And then the most successful businessman in town decides to ditch his Range Rover and glamorous wife in exchange for Latin books and stargazing.

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what connects him to a jazz buff in Tokyo? A woman on a holy mountain talks to a tree, and the tree talks back. Add to this a Mongolian gangster, an English spy, a despondent "zookeeper", a nuclear scientist, a ghostwriter, a ghost, and a late night New York DJ. All of them have tales to tell, and all must play their part as they are caught up in the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the internet? Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother. In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried.

Only very special people are chosen by children's author Laura White to join 'The Society', an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a 10th member has been selected: Ella, literature teacher and possessor of beautifully curving lips. But soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual, 'The Game'? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura's winter party, in a whirlwind of snow? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves?

The novel follows the adolescent Arturo through his days on the isolated Neapolitan island of Procida, where - his mother long deceased, his father often absent, and a dog as his sole companion - he roams the countryside and the beaches or reads in his family's lonely, dilapidated mansion. This quiet, meandering existence is upended when his father brings home a beautiful 16-year-old bride, Nunziatella.

Thirty-two-year-old Jess Abbot has lost everything: her job, her apartment, and - most heart-wrenching - her eight-year-old son, Chance, to a tragic accident. Haunted by memories and grief, Jess packs what’s left and heads for the small mountain town of Pine Lake, where she takes a position as caregiver to an eccentric old woman. A rumored clairvoyant, Lucy is strange but welcoming and immediately intuits Jess as a “loose end” in need of closure. But Jess isn’t the only guest in Lucy’s large Victorian home.

Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this moving, richly imagined novel is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a 13-year-old girl, whose family is compelled to flee their home in Tehran for a new life in a small village, hoping in this way to preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives. But they soon find themselves caught up in the post-revolutionary chaos that sweeps across their ancient land. Bahar's mother, after a tragic loss, embarks on a long, eventful journey in search of meaning in a world swept up in the post-revolutionary madness.

Follow Me to Ground is fascinating and frightening, urgent and propulsive. In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. Short but authoritative, Follow Me to Ground lingers long after listening, pulling the listener into a dream between fairy tale and nightmare, desire and delusion, folktale and warning.

When John Harvey’s watch stops working on the morning of February 3rd, 1987, he has an epiphany. It occurs to him that every personal trauma he is trying to forget has had one thing in common: they all occurred at some point on the face of that very watch. The loss of his job, the death of his child, Zola’s suicide, all contained right there in that tiny circle of finite numbers. So he smashes the watch. Problem solved. But when John steps out the door to make his daily trek to the local bar as a man newly freed from the tyrannies of time, he is met by a snowstorm.

García Márquez retrata con pulso magistral la figura de Simón Bolívar, que transmutó el destino de América. Aclamado por el pueblo como Libertador, blanco de numerosas conjuras políticas y militares, héroe romántico y hasta libertino para sus detractores y sus partidarios, idealista íntegro y abandonado que contempla las ruinas de su sueño de unidad de los pueblos americanos, tras la independencia del dominio español Simón Bolívar emprende - enfermo, con un menguado séquito - el que será su viaje final. Parte desde Bogotá para seguir el curso del río Magdalena.

On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight-year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.

On the glistening surface of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel is the Ramsay family, a seemingly stable group of characters, but a group that is ultimately subject to the same alterations and losses that come with the passing of time. Set at the Ramsays’ summerhouse over two September days, ten years apart, Woolf’s influential landmark of twentieth-century literature explores the hopes, frustrations, and small moments of grace and change that permeate everyday life.

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel.

Estamos en Macondo y su región una vez más, entre personajes y episodios reconocibles, pero ahora caen pájaros muertos sobre el poblado, rompiendo mosquiteros y alambradas, un cura ve al diablo o afirma haber encontrado al judío errante, y visitar la tumba de un ser querido supone un riesgo impredecible. Y hay que enterrar a la Mamá Grande, soberana absoluta de este mundo, que falleció en olor de santidad a los noventa y dos años, tras haber conservado la virginidad durante toda su vida, y a cuyos funerales acude el presidente de la República y hasta el Sumo Pontífice en su góndola papal.

Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the 20th century. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and, ultimately, his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: How could he have lost it all? Here, for the first time, is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up.