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To many foreigners, Colombia is a nightmare of drugs and violence. Yet normal life goes on there, and, in Bogotá, it's even possible to forget that war still ravages the countryside. This paradox of perceptions—outsiders' fears versus insiders' realities—drew June Carolyn Erlick back to Bogotá for a year's stay in 2005. She wanted to understand how the city she first came to love in 1975 has made such strides toward building a peaceful civil society in the midst of ongoing violence. The complex reality she found comes to life in this compelling memoir.

Erlick creates her portrait of Bogotá through a series of vivid vignettes that cover many aspects of city life. As an experienced journalist, she lets the things she observes lead her to larger conclusions. The courtesy of people on buses, the absence of packs of stray dogs and street trash, and the willingness of strangers to help her cross an overpass when vertigo overwhelms her all become signs of convivencia—the desire of Bogotanos to live together in harmony despite decades of war. But as Erlick settles further into city life, she finds that "war in the city is invisible, but constantly present in subtle ways, almost like the constant mist that used to drip down from the Bogotá skies so many years ago."

Shattering stereotypes with its lively reporting, A Gringa in Bogotá is must-reading for going beyond the headlines about the drug war and bloody conflict.

When the paralyzed cripple Domingo Vidal is rescued unsinged from a burning house, the people of Chima believe they have witnessed a miracle. Domingo becomes their patron "saint," and tales of his miracles multiply. Domingo makes the rains come, cures the blind and lame, and swells barren wombs with new life. But is Domingo really a saint, or is he a pagan idol? Padre Berrocal calls the people heretics, but they are afraid not to worship Domingo. To what excesses will superstition and ignorance drive the frightened people of Chima?

This novel, published in 1963 as En Chimá nace un santo, makes important connections between the frustrations of poverty and the excesses of religious fanaticism. Zapata Olivella indicts the dogmatic attitudes of religious and civil institutions as a major cause of the creation of local cults like the one that grows up around "Saint" Domingo. In Zapata Olivella's compelling narrative, the struggle over Domingo points up both the inflexibility of established institutions and the potential power for change that lies within the hands of a determined populace.

Aesthetics of Displacement centers the embodied aesthetic practices of Afro-Colombian people and their experiences, asking readers to reassess Colombian national history, legacies of colonialism and racism, politics of memory, and the inheritances of violence related to the Colombian armed conflict. Through a theoretical frame of destierro or “displacement” and an examination of the Afro-Colombian philosophy vivir sabroso or “to live harmoniously,” Aesthetics of Displacement focuses on how theatre-makers, choreographers, filmmakers, activist groups, and photojournalists create an embodied Colombian perspective informed by decolonial practices and thinking that rely on movement as a strategy for existence and that counter European hegemonic aesthetics as the major foundations of taste and value. This approach not only enhances our understanding of contemporary Colombian culture, but also highlights the importance of performance as a means of resistance and identity formation.

Lost in a shipwreck in 1895, rewritten before the author's suicide in 1896, and not published until 1925, José Asunción Silva's After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa) is one of Latin America's finest fin de siècle novels and the first one to be translated into English. Perhaps the single best work for understanding turn-of-the-twentieth-century writing in South America, After-Dinner Conversation is also cited as the continent's first psychological novel and an outstanding example of modernista fiction and the Decadent sensibility.

Semi-autobiographical and more important for style than plot, After-Dinner Conversation is the diary of a Decadent sensation-collector in exile in Paris who undertakes a quest to find his beloved Helen, a vision whom his fevered imagination sees as his salvation. Along the way, he struggles with irreconcilable urges and temptations that pull him in every direction while he endures an environment indifferent or hostile to spiritual and intellectual pursuits, as did the modernista writers themselves. Kelly Washbourne's excellent translation preserves Silva's lush prose and experimental style. In the introduction, one of the most wide-ranging in Silva criticism, Washbourne places the life and work of Silva in their literary and historical contexts, including an extended discussion of how After-Dinner Conversation fits within Spanish American modernismo and the Decadent movement. Washbourne's perceptive comments and notes also make the novel accessible to general readers, who will find the work surprisingly fresh more than a century after its composition.

Animals at the End of the World begins with an explosion, which six-year-old Inés mistakes for the end of the world that she has long feared. In the midst of the chaos, she meets the maid’s granddaughter, Mariá, who becomes her best friend and with whom she navigates the adult world in her grandparents’ confined house. Together, they escape the house and confront the “animals” that populate Bogotá in the 1980s. But Inés soon realizes she cannot count on either María or her preoccupied and conflicted parents. Alone, she must learn to decipher her outer and inner worlds, confronting both armies of beasts and episodes of domestic chaos. In the process, she also learns what it means to test boundaries, break rules, and cope with the consequences.

The first novel by Colombian author Gloria Susana Esquivel, Animals at the End of the World is a poetic and moving coming-of-age story that lingers long after its final page.