Latin American Literature

A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home. Why Apaches? asks the 10-year-old son. Because they were the last of something,answers his father. In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the Southwestern border into the US but getting detained - or lost in the desert along the way.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay—playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized—has a project to pass along. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried.

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.

Raymond Jaffe feels like he doesn’t belong. Not with his mother’s new family. Not as a weekend guest with his father and his father’s wife. Not at school, where he’s an outcast. After his best friend moves away, Raymond has only two real connections: to the feral cat he’s tamed and to a blind ninety-two-year-old woman in his building who’s introduced herself with a curious question: Have you seen Luis Velez?

Zavalita y el zambo Ambrosio conversan en La Catedral. Estamos en Perú, durante el «ochenio» dictatorial del general Manuel A. Odría. Unas cuantas cervezas y un río de palabras en libertad para responder a la palabra amordazada por la dictadura.

In this stunning work of historical fiction, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America--a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record. In 1527 the conquistador Pnfilo de Narvez sailed from the port of Sanlcar de Barrameda with a crew of 600 men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and famous as Hernn Corts.

Secular humanism has triumphed. Everything the late Victorians and Edwardians believed would bring human happiness has been achieved: Technology has made it so no one needs to work for a living, the social sciences ensure a smooth-running social order, and, in the name of tolerance, religious beliefs have been uprooted and eliminated except for a single holdout - a largely discredited and rapidly shrinking Catholic Church. Yet people are unhappy.

When Louis Trevelyan's young wife meets an old family acquaintance, his unreasonable jealousy of their friendship sparks a quarrel that leads to a brutal and tragic estrangement.

Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter. While his betrayal of family, duty and honour gives him the freedom to achieve greatness, his decision leads to an obsession which carries severe implications.

From the award-winning, best-selling author of When I Was Puerto Rican, a powerful novel of family, race, faith, sex, and disaster that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, revealing the lives and loves of five women and the secret that binds them together.

Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister, Cassandra, enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways.

This unique fairy tale filled with whimsy and satire is much more than a story for the nursery. The tale begins with two old philosophers who live in a dark pine wood with their companions the Grey woman of Dun Gortin and the Thin Woman of Inis Magrath. When the wife of farmer MacMurrachu loses her washing board, the farmer comes to ask the philosophers for advice. They direct the old farmer not to a washboard, but to a tree containing a pot of gold.

A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it?

1549. Convinced he’s destined to fulfill a whispered prophecy, Friar Diego de Landa labors to convert the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula. Discovering a brutal Spanish landowner persecuting the native population, Friar Diego determines to protect them and punish the cruel man. 2010. Cortez Vuscar is convinced his father will return if he can grow their church’s congregation. Certain he’s found his true love, Cortez sets out to win her from her wealthy, unfaithful boyfriend. But his fascination with the literature she’s reading infects his mind with a deadly descent into madness.

All the delightful and bizarre inhabitants of Wonderland are here: the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, the hooka-smoking Caterpillar and the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Ugly Duchess... and, of course, Alice herself - growing alternately taller and smaller, attending demented tea parties and eccentric croquet games, and observing everything with clarity and rational amazement.

L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He’s harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters - Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude.

America Ferrera has always felt wholly American, and yet, her identity is inextricably linked to her parents’ homeland and Honduran culture. Speaking Spanish at home, having Saturday morning salsa-dance parties in the kitchen, and eating tamales alongside apple pie at Christmas never seemed at odds with her American identity. Still, she yearned to see that identity reflected in the larger American narrative. Now, in American Like Me, America invites 31 of her friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories about life between cultures.

Kamilah Vega is desperate to convince her family to update their Puerto Rican restaurant and enter it into the Fall Foodie Tour. With the gentrification of their Chicago neighborhood, it's the only way to save the place. The fly in her mofongo—her blackmailing abuelo says if she wants to change anything in his restaurant, she'll have to marry the one man she can't stand: his best friend’s grandson.

At the height of World War II, the British Air Transport Auxiliary need help. A group of young women volunteer for action, but the perils of their new job don’t end on the tarmac. Things are tough in the air, but on the ground their abilities as pilots are constantly questioned. There is friction from the start between the new recruits. Spirited American Lizzie turns heads with her audacity, but few can deny her flying skills. She couldn’t be more different from shy, petite Ruby, who is far from diminutive in the sky. It falls to pragmatic pilot May to bring the women together.

Mexico in the 1970s is a dangerous country, even for Maite, a secretary who spends her life seeking the romance found in cheap comic books and ignoring the activists protesting around the city. When her next-door neighbor, the beautiful art student Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents.