Books by Gregory Rabassa

The bestselling and critically successful novel about the rise and fall and birth and death of the mystical town of Macondo as seen through the history of the Buendia family.

The discovery of a South American dictator's rotting corpse in the deserted tangle of his crumbling palace prompts a search through his past and colorful chronicle of his progression from popular, beloved, unafraid ruler to isolated, frightened despot Reprint.

"Majestic . . . Superb . . . a stunning portrait of the archetype, the pathological fascist tyrant. Garcia Marquez is as exorbitant as Melville and Dostoyevsky."--New York Times Book Review

Living by their wits in the steamy slums of Bahia, a gang of orphans and runaways, led by fifteen-year-old "Bullet," spend their time stealing from Brazil's rich and privilaged until public outcry demands their capture.

The Nobel laureate weaves a story of a fantastic wedding, the return of the bride to her parents, her brothers' resolve to murder her corruptor, and the townspeoples' refusal to depart from routine.

The works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, recognized as one of the literary titans of the 20th century, continue to ignite new generations of avid readers. The three novellas featured in this internationally acclaimed collection, Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, are vintage Marquez that brilliantly illustrate his genius.

Short stories by the 1982 Nobel laureate in literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. "The stories are rich and startling . . . confident and elegant . . . magical."--John Updike, The New Yorker

A Haunting tale of power, corruption,
and the complex search for identity

Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town.

Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. More than a historic analysis, Conversation in The Cathedral is a groundbreaking novel that tackles identity as well as the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a people and a nation.

Determined to regain the land her late husband had bequeathed to his illegitimate mulatto son, Do¦¯ InTs, the matriarch of a wealthy, eighteenth-century Caracas family, continues her quest, even after her death in 1780, over the course of two centuries of Venezuelan history. Reprint.

'In this new work by the foremost Portuguese novelist, the reunion of five men on the tenth anniversary of their battalion's return from Mozambique, Portugal's Vietnam, ends in a fatal stabbing - which ultimately serves as an act of liberation for the corrupt city of Lisbon.' Newsday

Looks at the history and development of Brazilian coffee and sugar plantations.

A prize-winning novel and best-seller in Portugal is written in the form of a memoir by the well-intentioned governor of a Roman city in Portugal during the empire's decline--a time of political, religious, and social turbulence. Winner of the Pegasus Prize for Literature. Reprint.

Mario Vargas Llosa's classic early novel takes place in a Peruvian town, situated between desert and jungle, which is torn by boredom and lust. Don Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while he charms its innocent people, setting in motion a chain reaction with extraordinary consequences.

This brothel, called the Green House, brings together the innocent and the corrupt: Bonificia, a young Indian girl saved by the nuns only to become a prostitute; Father Garcia, struggling for the church; and four best friends drawn to both excitement and escape.

The conflicting forces that haunt the Green House evoke a world balanced between savagery and civilization -- and one that is cursed by not being able to discern between the two.

An account of the adventures of one Horacio Oliveira in Paris and in Argentina, and in reinvention of the novel itself.

Gregory Rabassa, the eminent translator who brought much of the Latin American literature of the last 40 years to a world audience, writes candidly about his work. Rabassa (who is half Cuban, half American) sees translating as essentially a hopeless task: nothing will ever equal its original (though Gabriel García Márquez is said to prefer Rabassa's English version of ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE to his own). Given those limits, however, Rabassa sees the act of translating is essentially intuitive rather than logical. In this fascinating book, he writes about his life and his experiences, and proves that he is as good a writer as many of the masters he translates.

Written just before One Hundred Years of Solitude, this fascinating novel of a Colombian river town possessed by evil points to the author's later flowering and greatness.

This collection of fiction, representing some of García Márquez's earlier work, includes eleven short stories and a novella, Innocent Eréndira, in which a young girl who dreams of freedom cannot escape the reach of her vicious and avaricious grandmother.

A memoir of Lolita Lebron, the Puerto Rican nationalist and guerilla, written by her granddaughter. Lebron became infamous as part of the group of assassins who opened fire on the House of Representatives on March 1, 1954, wounding five congressmen.

In this collection of acclaimed short fiction by a modern master of the form, the title piece--Garcia Marquez's first novel, originally published in 1955--stands out. It takes place in the fictional town, Macondo, made famous in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. In LEAF STORM, the place has been devastated by the closing of the banana company that gave it what little prosperity it had. Told from the shifting points of view of an old colonel, his difficult daughter, and his young grandson, it revolves around the colonel's long-ago promise to give a decent burial to the man his fellow citizens hate most. This volume also includes four stories from the collection INNOCENT ERENDIRA (1972), and two early stories, "Nabo" and "Monologue of Isabel Watching the Rain in Macondo."

A well-known Puerto Rican writer, Sanchez first published this novel in 1980. It covers one day in the life of the city of San Juan, and introduces a huge and colorful cast of characters.

An anti-Francoist exile returning to his home in Barcelona finds Spain to be a deeply troubled place, and he liberates himself from it by rejecting its language, culture, and politics. This novel is the first of a trilogy about nationalism and identity.

A razor-sharp memoir about the allure of suicide for three generations of women in one Puerto Rican family, A Message from God in the Atomic Age delves into the frightening secrets that have haunted a grandmother, mother, and daughter, alternating between Vilar's notes from the psychiatric ward and her recounting of her family history. of photos.

This landmark novel by Colombia's great Nobelist chronicles the irreconcilable conflict in the Buendia family between the desire for solitude and the need for love. Its rich, imaginative prose introduced to the world the genre known as "magical realism."

A celebration of the endless variety of life in the mythical village of Macondo chronicles the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of the small South American town.

A beguiling mix of politics, magic, romance, and sex, the saga of the mysterious history of the Buendia family of the village of Macondo does nothing less than recapitulate the entire history of the human race. Written with little regard for traditional novelistic conventions, Garcia Marquez's novel incorporates emotional responses in lieu of plot, a cyclical approach to fractured time lines, and many different characters with similar or identical names. The first of a wave of Spanish-language novels characterized by what came to be known as magical realism, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE was an immediate success on its initial publication and was translated into more than 40 languages. It established Garcia Marquez as one of the preeminent authors of his generation.

Probably García Márquez’s finest and most famous work, One Hun-dred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1928 in the town of Araca-taca, Colombia. Latin America’s preeminent man of letters, he is considered by many to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He began his writing career as a journalist and is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn ofthe Patriarch, and Collected Stories. His most recent work is a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. García Már-quez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

By turns flippant and profound, "The Posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas" is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave.

An 1881 novel by Brazil's greatest novelist, about the scion of a wealthy family who struggles to produce a miracle drug, and dies in the attempt. He writes his story from beyond the grave, by a mysterious process he refuses to reveal, but which frees him from the usual constraints felt by living writers, and enables him to tell the complete truth.

Along with The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro, Quincas Borba is one of Machado de Assis' major works and indeed one of the major works of nineteenth century fiction. When the mad philosopher Quincas Borba dies, he leaves to his friend Rubiao the entirety of his wealth and property, with a single stipulation: Rubiao must take care of Quincas Borba's dog, who is also named Quincas Borba, and who may indeed have assumed the soul of the dead philosopher. Rush with his newfound wealth, Rubiao heads for Rio de Janeiro and plunges headlong into a world where fantasy and reality become increasingly difficult to keep separate.

When the mad philosopher Quincas Borba dies, he leaves to his friend Rubiao the entirety of his wealth and property, with a single stipulation: Rubiao must take care of Quincas Borba's dog, who is also named Quincas Borba, and who may indeed have assumed the soul of the dead philosopher. Flush with his newfound wealth, Rubiao heads for Rio de Janeiro and plunges headlong into a world where fantasy and reality become increasingly difficult to keep separate. We encounter roses that speak to each other, discussing the character and actions of their owner, Sofia; even the stars above occasionally comment, sarcastically, on the humans below. When Rubiao falls in love with the wife of his best friend, we see adultery as yet another betrayal of reality. Rubiao's own hold on reality becomes ever more tenuous as he makes elaborate plans for his marriage, even though he has no bride, and fantasizes that he has become Napoleon III. The very nature of reality, the novel seems to he saying, is an agreed-upon fiction told by an unreliable narrator.

Called "hallucinatory and lyrical" (Publishers Weekly), The Return of the Caravels -- selected as a New York times Summer Reading title -- is a powerful indictment of Portuguese colonialism and another literary tour de force from the pen of Antonio Lobo Antunes, "the greatest living Portuguese writer" (Vogue). It is set in Lisbon as Portugal's African colonies gain their independence in the mid-1970s. In a contemporary response to Camoes's conquest epic The Lusiads, Antunes imagines Vasco da Gama and other heroes of Portuguese explorations beached amid the detritus of the empire's collapse. Or is it the modern colonials -- with their mixed-race heritage and uneasy place in the "fatherland" -- who have somehow ended up in sixteenth-century Lisbon? As da Gama begins winning back ownership of Lisbon piece by piece in crooked card games, four hundred years of Portuguese history mingle -- the caravels dock next to Iraqi oil tankers, and the slave trade rubs shoulders with the duty-free shops. The Return of the Caravels is a startling and uncompromising look at one of Europe's great colonial powers, and how the era of conquest reshaped not just Portugal but the world. "... the voice of Nabokov by way of Cortazar, Gogol by way of Dylan." -- Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Antunes has empathy for the contradictions of human feeling. He is a warm-bloodied writer."-- Michael Pye, The New York Times Book Review "[Antunes] deserves a wide audience of discerning readers." -- Michael Mewshaw, The Washington Post Book World

Set in Colombia in the 1980s--during the heyday of the Medellín drug empire--this novel begins when its protagonist, the eponymous Rosario Tijeras, lies dying in a hospital after being shot. A femme fatale who is also a ruthless hit-woman, Rosario began killing after she was raped, and went on to work for her mob-affiliated brother. The story is narrated by young Antonio, whose friend Emilio was Rosario's great love.

These striking novellas are the witty crystalizations of Jose Donoso's concerns over a lifetime of writing. In them he poses many of the questions raised by his fellow Latin American writers, Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, and Vargas Llosa. Taratuta is a mystery story in which a writer tries to track a slippery Russian revolutionary in history and in life. Still Life with Pipe shows the comeuppance of an ambitious man when he meets true art and can't escape its grasp.

A sought after classic. Carlos Drummond de Andrade is univesally recognized as a major force not only in Brazil but as one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century. This, the first full-scale presentation in English of his work, spans his career as a poet while concentrating on his most furitful period--the 1930s and 1940s. Many of these poems helped to define the tenor of modernism in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.

Jorge Amado has been called one of the great writers of our time. The joyfulness of his storytelling and his celebration of lifes sensual pleasures have found him a loyal following. With The War Of The Saints, he has created an exuberant tale set among the flashing rhythms, intoxicating smells, and bewitching colors of the carnival. The holy icon of Saint Barbara of the Thunder is bound for the city of Bahia for an exhibition of holy art. As the boat the bears the image is docking, a miracle occurs and Saint Barbara comes to life, disappearing into the milling crowd on the quay. Somewhere in the city a young woman has fallen in love, and her prudish guardian aunt has locked her away--an act of intolerance that Saint Barbara must redress. And when she casts her spell over the city, no one's life will remain unchanged.

Searching for his own identity in the kaleidoscopic, drug-influenced nightclub milieu of Lisbon's demimonde, the son of a legendary transvestite also evaluates the lives and deaths of his father and his father's lover. Original.

Cortazar's mesmerizing and surreal 1972 novel takes place in "the city"--a nameless European metropolis whose identity is in the eye of the beholder. To one inhabitant, it's Paris, to another it's Barcelona. The beholders, in this case, are an eccentric and oddly-assorted group of bohemians and eccentrics.