"Desconcertante, lista a inquietar a la crítica, está ya en los escaparates la primera novela de Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, que transcurre en una serie de transposiciones oníricas, ahondando más allá de la muerte de sus personajes, que uno no sabe en qué momento son sueño, vida, fábula, verdad, pero a los que se les oye la voz al través de la perspicacia despiadada y certera de tan sin duda extraordinario escritor". Con estas palabras iniciaba Edmundo Valdés la primera reseña de Pedro Páramo, aparecida el 30 de marzo de 1955 y conservada por Juan Rulfo entre sus papeles.

A searing portrayal of Vienna's bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an 'artistic dinner' hosted by a composer and his society wife-a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day.

Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the listener as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy.

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia. By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of church and state in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel - Roberto Bolaño's first work available in English - recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and conservative literary critic, a sort of lapdog to the rich and powerful cultural elite.

Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormenters.

How It Is, a landmark in 20th century literature, is one of the most challenging of Samuel Beckett's early novels. He published it first in French in 1961 and then in his own translation in 1964. He explained in a letter that it was the outpouring of a "'man' lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his 'life' as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him.... The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within...."

With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's astounding pyschological thriller, newly revised for his bicentenniel.

In 1961, the University of Chicago Press published Richmond Lattimore's translation of Homer’s The Iliad. For more than sixty years, it has served to introduce readers to the ancient Greek world of gods and heroes and has been one of the most popular and respected versions of the work. Yet through all those decades, Chicago never published a companion translation of the best-known epic in the Western canon, The Odyssey—until now.

One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.

Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.

This is Jon Fosse’s critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption.

Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor.

Using, or rather mimicking, traditional forms of storytelling, Gogol created stories that are complete within themselves and only tangentially connected to a meaning or moral. His work belongs to the school of invention, where each twist and turn of the narrative is a surprise unfettered by obligation to an overarching theme.

'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.' So opens Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first novel, published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from life, in search of stupor. Murphy's lovestruck fiancée, Celia, tries with tragic pathos to draw him back, but her attempts are doomed to failure. In Dublin, Murphy's friends and familiars are simulacra of him, fragmented and incomplete. They come to London in search of him.

"Desconcertante, lista a inquietar a la crítica, está ya en los escaparates la primera novela de Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, que transcurre en una serie de transposiciones oníricas, ahondando más allá de la muerte de sus personajes, que uno no sabe en qué momento son sueño, vida, fábula, verdad, pero a los que se les oye la voz al través de la perspicacia despiadada y certera de tan sin duda extraordinario escritor". Con estas palabras iniciaba Edmundo Valdés la primera reseña de Pedro Páramo, aparecida el 30 de marzo de 1955 y conservada por Juan Rulfo entre sus papeles.

Rulfo comenta los relatos que sigue escribiendo en cartas a su novia Clara Aparicio. En 1951 se publica el séptimo, "Diles que no me maten", en la revista América. Gracias a la primera beca que Rulfo recibe del Centro Mexicano de Escritores puede terminar los ocho que aparecerán con los previos en 1953, en el libro titulado El Llano en llamas, dedicado a Clara. Dos relatos más, aparecidos en revistas en 1955, serán incluidos en la edición de 1970.

A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.

A searing portrayal of Vienna's bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an 'artistic dinner' hosted by a composer and his society wife-a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day.

Written with compassionate realism and wit, the stories in this mesmerizing collection depict the disparities of town and village life in South America, of the frightfully poor and outrageously rich, of memories and illusions, and of lost opportunities and present joys. Stories include "No One Writes to the Colonel", "Tuesday Siesta", "One of These Days", "There Are No Thieves in This Town", "Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon", "Montiel's Widow", "One Day After Saturday", "Artificial Roses", and "Big Mama's Funeral".

As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz’s heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes’ masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.

Un misterioso edificio construido en una isla en 1924, un diario escrito por un fugitivo encerrado en sí mismo que se enamora de una mujer impasible, y un comentarista que lo desautoriza en distintas notas al pie. Para la mayoría de los lectores —y qué difícil sería desmentirlos—, La invención de Morel es la obra maestra de Adolfo Bioy Casares, una novela con componentes filosóficos tan potente que llegó a influir, especialmente por medio de Lost, sobre el universo aún en boga de las series.

Stewing in an Australian prison, Jasper Dean reflects on his relationship with his dead father and recounts the many zany adventures they shared together.

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.

One of Carlos Fuentes’s greatest works, The Old Gringo tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, and journalist, and of his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa’s soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict.

Bawdy and exotic, Tales from the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night features the wily, seductive Scheherazade, who saves her own life by telling tales of magical transformation, genies and wishes, flying carpets and fantastical journeys, terror and passion to entertain and appease the brutal King Shahryar.

Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the listener as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy.

Where do human societies come from? The drive to answer this question took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, when a generation of archaeologists began to look beyond the bible for the origins of different cultures and civilizations. Zelia Nuttall threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the tools of the emerging science of anthropology to prove that modern Mexico was built over the ruins of ancient civilizations.

Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.

Felipe Montero encuentra un día un anuncio en el periódico en el que se ofrece un empleo en la calle Doceles 815, editando las memorias de un general. Atraído por el salario, acepta el trabajo a pesar de su única condición: tiene que vivir en la oscura casona junto con la viuda del militar y su sobrina, la misteriosa Aura, de hermosos ojos verdes y una melena azabache. Aura es una de las novelas icónicas de la literatura mexicana del siglo XX y una de las más importantes de Carlos Fuentes, autor de La muerte de Artemio Cruz.