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Nellie Campobello, a prominent Mexican writer and "novelist of the Revolution," played an important role in Mexico's cultural renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s, along with such writers as Rafael Muñoz and Gregorio López y Fuentes and artists Diego Rivera, Orozco, and others. Her two novellas, Cartucho (first published in 1931) and My Mother's Hands (first published as Las manos de Mamá in 1938), are autobiographical evocations of a childhood spent amidst the violence and turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico. Campobello's memories of the Revolution in the north of Mexico, where Pancho Villa was a popular hero and a personal friend of her family, show not only the stark realism of Cartucho but also the tender lyricism of My Mother's Hands. They are noteworthy, too, as a first-person account of the female experience in the early years of the Mexican Revolution and unique in their presentation of events from a child's perspective.

Originally published in 1981 as En breve cárcel,Certificate of Absence is the first novel of the Argentinian scholar-critic Sylvia Molloy. Innovative in its treatment of women's relationships and in its assertion of woman's right to author her own text, the novel has won wide approval in Latin America and the United States.

The novel centers around a woman writing in a small room. As she writes, remembering a past relationship and anticipating a future one, the room becomes a repository for nostalgia, violence, and desire, a space in which writing and remembering become life-sustaining ceremonies. The narrator reflects on the power of love to both shelter and destroy. She meditates on the act of writing, specifically on writing as a woman, in a voice that goes against the grain of established, canonical voices.

Latin American male writers are prone to self-portrayal in their texts. Certifcate of Absence is one of the few novels by Latin American women that successfully use this technique to open new windows on women's experiences.

This biting commentary on the follies of humankind by a noted Mexican author cuts deeply yet leaves readers laughing—at themselves as well as at others. With his surgical intelligence, Juan José Arreola exposes the shams and hypocrisies, the false values and vices, the hidden diseases of society. Confabulario total, 1941–1961, of which this book is a translation, combines three earlier books—Varia invención (1949), Confabulario (1952), Punta de plata (1958)—and numerous later pieces.

Although some of the pieces have a noticeably Mexican orientation, most of them transcend strictly regional themes to interpret the social scene in aspects common to all civilized cultures. Arreola’s view is not limited; much of his sophistication comes from his broad, deep, and varied knowledge of present and past, and from his almost casual use both of this knowledge and of his insight into its meaning for humanity. His familiarity with many little-known arts and sciences, numerous literatures, history, anthropology, and psychology, and his telling allusions to this rich lode of fact, increase the reader’s delight in his learned but witty, scalding but poetic, satire.

The first anthology of early Czech fantastic writing in translation.

Crossroads of Imagination is a rare English-language study of modern science fiction’s precursors beyond the U.S. and Britain. Many translated for the first time, these thirty texts reflect a rich Euro-Atlantic tradition from the Romantic age to World War II. Authors include Jakub Arbes, Karel Čapek, Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, Ladislav Klíma, Jiří Mordechai Langer, Jan Neruda, Emilie Procházková, Jan Weiss, and Julius Zeyer. The anthology highlights women’s, Jewish, and queer voices.

Prefaces to each selection uncover how new ideas and technologies shaped the European fantastic—positivism, mistrust of elites, pacifism, spiritism, and xenophobia, alongside expansions in communications, transportation, electrification, and technical education. Comparative essays and annotations look beyond “major” literatures and emphasize those of East-Central Europe. Archival images enliven this collection. General and genre readers alike will discover new stories and authors, as well as a fantastic tradition shared across Europe and North America before the advent of modern science fiction.

This richly orchestrated novel, which won a national literary prize in the author's native land, Venezuela, also earned international recognition when the William Faulkner Foundation gave it an award as the most notable novel published in Ibero America between 1945 and 1962.

Cumboto's disturbing story unfolds during the early decades of the twentieth century on a Venezuelan coconut plantation, in a turbulent Faulknerian double world of black and white. It records the lives of Don Federico, the effete survivor of a once vigorous family of landowners, and his Black servant Natividad, who since the days of their mutual childhood has been his only friend.

Young Federico, psychologically impotent and lost to human contact, lives on as a lonely recluse in the century-old main house of "Cumboto," surrounded by descendants of African slaves who still manage, despite his apathy, to keep the plantation on its feet. Natividad's heroic and selfless struggle to redeem his friend by awakening him to the stirrings of the earth and life about him sets in motion a series of events that are to shatter Federico's childlike world: a headlong love affair with a voluptuous black girl, her terrified flight in the face of the bitter condemnation of her own people, and the unexpected appearance, twenty years later, of their extraordinary son.

Throughout the novel runs a recurring theme: neither race can survive without the other. Black and white, Díaz Sánchez suggests, embody contrasting aspects of human nature, which are not inimical but complementary: the languid intellectualism of European culture must be tempered with the indestructible vitality and intuition of the African soul if humanity is ever fully to comprehend the living essence of the world.