"I love the native race with a tender love, and so I have observed its customs closely, enchanted by their simplicity, and, as well, the abjection into which this race is plunged by small-town despots, who, while their names may change, never fail to live up to the epithet of tyrants. They are no other than, in general, the priests, governors, caciques, and mayors." So wrote Clorinda Matto de Turner in Aves sin nido, the first major Spanish American novel to protest the plight of native peoples.

First published in 1889, Birds without a Nest drew fiery protests for its unsparing expose of small town officials, judicial authorities, and priests who oppressed the native peoples of Peru. Matto de Turner was excommunicated by the Catholic Church and burned in effigy. Yet her novel was strongly influential; indeed, Peruvian President Andres Avelino Caceres credited it with stimulating him to pursue needed reforms.

In 1904, the novel was published in a bowdlerized English translation with a modified ending. This edition restores the original ending and the translator's omissions. It will be important reading for all students of the indigenous cultures of South America.

Lon Otto was born in Marshall, Missouri, in 1948, and for a number of years wrote almost nothing but poetry. Otto now writes mostly fiction and says, "The major influence in my development as a writer seems to have been the chain-drive, pneumatic-tire bicycle. For instance, it was during several months spent running a bicycle shop in Manhattan that I discovered a strangeness in the world that could only be borne in fiction. Later, I had a brief career as a bicycle racer, devoid of glory. Several of my stories in A Nest of Hooks involve bicycles, and almost all were written in sight of an old poster on which a naked woman clings serenely to a parrot-winged bicycle.