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Professor Juan Manuel Barrientos prefers footsteps to footnotes. Fighting a hangover, he manages to keep his appointment to lead a group of students on a walking lecture among the historic buildings of downtown Mexico City. When the students fail to show up, however, he undertakes a solo tour that includes more cantinas than cathedrals. Unable to resist either alcohol itself or the introspection it inspires, Professor Barrientos muddles his personal past with his historic surroundings, setting up an inevitable conclusion in the very center of Mexico City.

First published in Mexico in the late 1990s, And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers was immediately lauded as a contemporary masterpiece in the long tradition of literary portraits of Mexico City. It is a book worthy of its dramatic title, which is drawn from a line in the Mexican national anthem.

Gonzalo Celorio first earned a place among the leading figures of Mexican letters for his scholarship and criticism, and careful readers will recognize a scholar's attention to accuracy within the novel's dyspeptic descriptions of Mexico City. The places described are indeed real (this edition includes a map that marks those visited in the story), though a few have since closed or been put to new uses. Dick Gerdes's elegant translation now preserves them all for a new audience.

Why Havana attracted the most important architects in the 1950s, and how the Cuban Revolution transformed the uses of these impressive skyscrapers. 

During the 1950s, Havana’s Vedado district became an epicenter of modern architecture. Architects from around the world—including Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and Josep Lluis Sert—worked in Cuba and helped make Havana one of the most modern capitals in Latin America. After the Cuban Revolution, the buildings designed during Cuba’s American-influenced hyper-capitalist past had to be reimagined, about what use what use could luxury hotels, private condominiums, and golf clubs could have in a socialist society. Writers and artists from around the world including Simone de Beauvoir, Agnès Varda, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, and Gabriel García Márquez flocked to Havana to witness the first socialist experiment in the Americas and marveled at the modern towers. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about “Skyscrapers in Havana” for his first journalistic piece about his trip. In contrast, modern architects abandoned Cuba after the Revolution: not even those designers who had built projects there set foot in the island again. 

Considering Havana’s architecture as part of a larger Cuban modernity, Gallo places built projects in dialogue with film, literature, and other cultural texts, revealing how poets, novelists, filmmakers, and designers theorized the city’s urban fabric. Skyscrapers in Havana features six chapters, each devoted to an iconic modernist structure, as well as five shorter meditations on the architects, including Le Corbusier, who had the opportunity to go to Cuba after the Revolution but decided to stay away.