By Daniel Alarcón.
The powerful and searing novel of three lives fractured by a civil war For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war. But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.
By Isabel Allende ; translated from the Spanish by Magda Bogin ; with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.
A magnificent saga of proud and passionate men and women and the turbulent times through which they suffer and triumph. They are the Truebas. And theirs is a world you will not want to leave, and one you will not forget.
By Jorge Amado ; [translated from the Portuguese by James L. Taylor and William Grossman].
Lusty, satirical and full of intrigue, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon is a vastly entertaining panorama of small town Brazilian life in the 1920s.
By Mariano Azuela ; a new rendition, with notes, by Beth Jörgensen, based on the E. Munguía, Jr., translation ; introduction by Ilán Stavans.
"Hailed as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution, The Underdogs recounts the story of an illiterate but charismatic Indian peasant farmer's part in the rebellion against Porfirio Diaz, and his subsequent loss of belief in the cause when the revolutionary alliance becomes factionalized. Azuela's masterpiece is a timeless, authentic portrayal of peasant life, revolutionary zeal, and political disillusionment."--BOOK JACKET.
By Roberto Bolaño ; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
An American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interact in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared.
By Jorge Luis Borges ; translated with an introduction by Andrew Hurley.
Twenty fictional pieces survey the depth and range of the distinguished Argentine writer's forty-year career as he journeys inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Maya priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a man awaiting his assassin, and a woman plotting vengeance on her father's "killer."
By James Cañón.
Left behind when their husbands are forced to fight in a civil war, the women of a small Colombian village struggle to survive, in the process creating a peaceful new community that is thrown into turmoil when the men return four years later.
By Ana Castillo.
Suspenseful, moving novel about a sensuous, smart, and fiercely independent woman. Eking out a living as a teacher’s aide in a small New Mexican border town, Tía Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo, a hardworking boy who has entered the country illegally and aspires to the priesthood. When Gabo’s father, Rafa, disappears while crossing over from Mexico, Regina fears the worst.
By Denise Chávez.
Teresina "Tere" Avila escapes from her life in a small New Mexican town through being secretary of the local Pedro Infante Club.
By Sandra Cisneros.
During her family's annual car trip from Chicago to Mexico City, Lala Reyes listens to stories about her family, including her grandmother, the descendant of a renowned dynasty of shawl makers, whose magnificent striped shawl has come into Lala's possession.
By Carlos Cisneros.
A young lawyer finds himself caught up in a wrongful death case that involves insurance fraud, theft, and possibly murder on the Texas-Mexico border.
By Leila Cobo.
Gabriella discovers her mother's journal--a book that begins as a new mother's letters to her baby girl, but becomes a secret diary. The final entry leaves one question unanswered: the night her mother died, was she returning to Colombia to end an affair, or was she abandoning her family for good?
By Lucha Corpi.
new installment in the acclaimed mystery series that features the first Chicana detective in American literature Annotation: A new installment in the acclaimed mystery series that features the first Chicana detective in American literature.
By Carolina De Robertis.
Follows the story of the fiercely independent women of the Firielli family as their lives, relationships, and the pursuit of their dreams take them from Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and the United States.
By Fernando del Paso ; translation by Alfonso Gonzalez and Stella T. Clark.
If there was not so much fiction in News from the Empire, it could be called a work of history. In fact, the focus of this broad work is history itself, as well as the many unrecorded lives and events that history has forgotten from this strange era in Mexico's early nationhood. Using Emperor Maximilian and his wife, Carlota, as a starting point, Fernando Del Paso both considers what Mexico is and the country's place in the larger narrative of world history. The book spans the palaces of Europe and the villages of Mexico, yet despite its broad focus News is a book rich in characters and details, a work that opens up this era of Mexican history to readers without specialized knowledge. Maximilian and Carlota are the focus of the book, and even if they are not explicitly on every page, they are always in the background somewhere, providing the humanizing contradictions that fill it. Del Paso draws a complicated picture of two naïve people placed in a situation they could not manage and a country they did not understand. This innocence is especially inexplicable in the case of Maximilian, who, as brother of Austria's Emperor Franz Josef, should have known something about ruling but is completely unable to govern.
By Junot Díaz.
Publisher description: Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ-the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.
By José Donoso ; translated by Hardie St. Martin.
In the face of pitiless adversity, a Chilean writer's talent begins to fade in this carefully crafted and bitterly comic meditation on gardens, deceit, and the nature of a writer's muse.
By Tomás Eloy Martínez ; translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane.
A macabre comedy on Eva Peron's corpse--hidden, hijacked, replicated, smuggled abroad, buried, resurrected and repatriated. The protagonists include a military intelligence officer trying to identify the genuine article from the many copies in order to dispose of it. That way the Peronistas will not be able to exploit it for political ends.
By Laura Esquivel ; translated by Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen.
Despite the fact that she has fallen in love with a young man, Tita, the youngest of three daughters born to a tyrannical rancher, must obey tradition and remain single and at home to care for her mother.
By Alberto Fuguet ; translated from the Spanish by Ezra E. Fitz.
"Beltran Soler is from Chile, a land in constant movement. A seismologist who knows more about the science of tectonic plate movement than about life, he is cocooned in a world of seismic data, scientific articles, and natural disasters. Beltran believes he can protect himself from the world around him by losing himself to theoretical pursuits, but thousands of feet above the ground he so meticulously analyzes, on a flight to L.A. - the capital of film and the city in which he was raised - he has a conversation that sparks in him a firestorm of nostalgia. Suddenly Beltran finds himself recalling the fifty most important movies of his life - films both precious and absurd that affected him during his childhood and adolescence in the 1960s and '70s." "From Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to kitschy disaster films such as Earthquake!, as well as cult classics of '70s sci-fi such as Logan's Run, Beltran connects with his past by remembering the films he saw, the people with whom he saw them, and even the theaters in which they were shown. Recalling one movie after another, he reconstructs the unusual history of his eccentric and dysfunctional family, coming to terms with his obsession with the movies that helped define him - often whether he wanted them to or not." "Set in the oddly parallel worlds of Nixon's suburban California and Pinochet's Santiago de Chile, this ingenious novel throws us into the claustrophobic world of an adolescent who tries to escape from a tumultuous and fragmented existence, one caught between two languages, two cultures, and two families that watch the same movies. Movies of My Life is a book about film and about how movies embed themselves in our souls, helping us all share a blinding fondness for the magic of make-believe."--BOOK JACKET.
By Gabriel Garciá Márquez ; translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.
From charity to deceit, benevolence to violence, fear of God to extreme cruelty, the dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch embodies the best and the worst of human nature. Gabriel García Márquez, the renowned master of magical realism, vividly portrays the dying tyrant caught in the prison of his own dictator-ship. Employing an innovative, dreamlike style, and overflowing with symbolic descriptions, the novel transports the reader to a world that is at once fanciful and real.
By Cristina García.
The story of two Cuban sisters, one living in Cuba, the other in the United States. The novel is at once the tale of a family and of a country, the sisters representing the lot of Cubans who left and those who stayed. Eventually the sisters are re-united on U.S. soil. By the author of Dreaming in Cuban.
By Gabriel García Márquez ; translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.
Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.
By by Alicia Gaspar de Alba.
From the Publisher: It's the summer of 1998 and for five years over a hundred mangled and desecrated bodies have been found dumped in the Chihuahua desert outside of Juarez, Mexico, just across the river from El Paso, Texas. The perpetrators of the ever-rising number of violent deaths target poor young women, terrifying inhabitants on both sides of the border. El Paso native Ivon Villa has returned to her hometown to adopt the baby of Cecilia, a pregnant maquiladora worker in Juarez. When Cecilia turns up strangled and disemboweled in the desert, Ivon is thrown into the churning chaos of abuse and murder. Even as the rapes and killings of "girls from the south" continue-their tragic stories written in desert blood-a conspiracy covers up the crimes that implicate everyone from the Maquiladora Association to the Border Patrol. When Ivon's younger sister gets kidnapped in Juarez, Ivon knows that it's up to her to find her sister, whatever it takes. Despite the sharp warnings she gets from family, friends, and nervous officials, Ivon's investigation moves her deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of silence. From acclaimed poet and prose-writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Desert Blood is a gripping thriller that ponders the effects of patriarchy, gender identity, border culture, transnationalism, and globalization on an international crisis.
By Francisco Goldman.
Maria de la Nieves Moran, daughter of an Irish-American father and Central American mother, encounters an unforgettable cast of characters in late-nineteenth-century Central America and New York--including Cuban hero Jose Marti.
By Oscar Hijuelos.
In a part sequel and part retelling of "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," the inspiration for the Mambo Kings' biggest hit, Maria, now 60 years old, reminisces about her days and nights in Havana, offering a completely different perspective on the Mambo Kings' story.
By by Rolando Hinojosa.
In the tragicomic novel, We Happy Few, internationally recognized author Rolando Hinojosa takes us inside the politics of a tumultuous university campus set in a quiet university town on the Texas-Mexico border.
By Arturo Islas.
Set in a fictional small town on the Texas-Mexico border, it tells the funny, sad and quietly outrageous saga of the children and grandchildren of Mama Chona the indomitable matriarch of the Angel clan who fled the bullets and blood of the 1911 revolution for a gringo land of promise.
By by Graciela Limón.
"Adriana Mora, a Latina photojournalist born and raised in Los Angeles, haunted by childhood memories of her parents death, abuse and displacement, journeys south to Chiapas, Mexico, in search of images to record on film. Initially, Mora finds a place in a small village where her path also crosses that of Chan Kin, the aged Lacandon shaman and interpreter of his people's mysticism." -- Back cover.
By Mario Vargas Llosa ; translated by Helen R. Lane.
Reality merges with fantasy in this hilarious comic novel about the world of radio soap operas and the pitfalls of forbidden passion by the bestselling author of The Storyteller. Sexy, sophisticated, older Aunt Julia, now divorced, seeks a new mate who can support her in high style. She finds instead her libidinous nephew, and their affair shocks both family and community.
By by Joachim Maria Machado de Assis ; translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson ; with a foreword by John Gledson and an afterword by João Adolfo Hansen.
"At last, a new translation of Machado's masterpiece that is complete (unlike Scott-Buccleuch's 1992 version - see HLAS 54:5078 - which omitted key chapters) and highly readable. Gledson produces a much-needed, graceful and accurate translation, attentive to Machado's tone and rhythms. Hansen's Afterword is excellent"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
By Jaime Manrique.
Chronicles the enthralling life of Manuela Sáenz, who won her place in history as the great love of South American liberator Simón Bolivar. Abandoning her position as one of the richest women in Lima, Sáenz worked to overthrow the corrupt representatives of the Spanish crown. She eventually attained the military rank of colonel and fought in numerous battles on behalf of the freedom movement and was incarcerated, wounded, and finally exiled from Colombia and Ecuador for life.
By Ańgeles Mastretta ; translated from the Spanish by Amy Schildhouse Greenberg.
"A number-one international bestseller, Women with Big Eyes is Mexican novelist Angeles Mastretta's most widely read work, now available for the first time in an English translation. Each of the stories in this volume reveals a different woman, yet they are all linked by a single thread: the revelation that women share an unnamed force, whether it comes in the form of iron resolve, flaming passion, or simply the knowing and mystical ways to nurture a soul." "Meet the outrageous Aunt Leonor, who denies herself the forbidden fruit of love until almost too late; mysterious Aunt Cristina, whose famed marriage is rumored to be nothing more than fable; radiant Aunt Valeria, whose secret happiness is to "close your eyes and make of your husband whatever most appeals to you"; and sage Aunt Ofelia, a woman who never cries. Run off to the sea with stubborn Aunt Natalia, smuggle wine with scheming Aunt Elena, or escape a kidnapping with cheeky Aunt Elvira." "Mastretta's women are vibrant, sly, wise, earthy, and full of life, with stories that mesmerize. From these pages, they look back at you, into you, each representing an aspect of what it means to be a woman with big eyes, able to see the world for what it is, and wink at it, and to make an uncompromising life within it."--BOOK JACKET.
By Ana Menéndez.
An elderly woman looks back on the world of revolutionary Cuba as she recalls her secret affair with revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, in the story of a young Cuban woman who searches for details about her birth mother.
By Horacio Castellanos Moya ; translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver.
A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors.
By Juan Carlos Onetti ; translated by Nick Caistor.
An Argentine shipbuilder faces an existential crisis in this classic from Onetti, one of this century's great Latin American authors.
By by Manuel Puig ; translated from the Spanish by Thomas Colchie.
Sometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause which makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love which makes all else endurable. Each has always been alone, and always - especially now - in danger of betrayal. But in cell, each surrenders to the other something of himself that he has never surrendered before.
By Ernesto Quiñonez.
The word is out in Spanish Harlem: Willy Bodega is king. Need college tuition for your daughter? Start-up funds for your fruit stand? Bodega can help. He gives everyone a leg up, in exchange only for loyalty--and a steady income from the drugs he pushes. Bodega turns to Chino, a smart, promising young man, for a favor. Chino is drawn to Bodega's street-smart idealism, but soon finds himself over his head, navigating an underworld of switchblade tempers, turncoat morality, and murder.--From publisher description.
By Manuel Ramos ; with a foreword by Alfredo Véa Jr. and an introduction by Ilan Stavans.
Luis, a detective working in Denver, is a remarkably upbeat soul in a world awash in domestic violence, gang and police brutality and the almost continual antagonism he faces as a Latino in a white world.
By Laura Restrepo ; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
From the Publisher: In this remarkably nuanced novel, both a gripping detective story and a passionate, devastating tale of eros and insanity in Colombia, internationally acclaimed author Laura Restrepo delves into the minds of four characters. There's Agustina, a beautiful woman from an upper-class family who is caught in the throes of madness; her husband Aguilar, a man passionately in love with his wife and determined to rescue her from insanity; Agustina's former lover Midas, a drug-trafficker and money-launderer; and Nicolas, Agustina's grandfather. Through the blend of these distinct voices, Restrepo creates a searing portrait of a society battered by war and corruption, as well as an intimate look at the daily lives of people struggling to stay sane in an unstable reality.
By by Juan Rulfo ; photographs by Josephine Sacabo ; translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of two artists--writer Juan Rulfo and photographer Josephine Sacabo. In one such village of the mind, Comala, Rulfo set his classic novel Pedro Paramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed--Susana San Juan. Recognizing that "Rulfo was describing a world I already knew" and feeling "a very personal response, particularly to Susana San Juan and her dilemma," Josephine Sacabo used Rulfo's novel as the starting point for a series of evocative photographs she calls "The Unreachable World of Susana San Juan: Homage to Juan Rulfo." This volume brings together Rulfo's novel and Sacabo's photographs to offer a dual artistic vision of the same unforgettable story. Margaret Sayers Peden's superb translation renders the novel as poetic and mysterious in English as it is in Spanish. Josephine Sacabo's photographs tell, in her words, "the story of a woman forced to take refuge in madness as a means of protecting her inner world from the ravages of the forces around her: a cruel and tyrannical patriarchy, a church that offers no redemption, the senseless violence of revolution, death itself."
By Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
The Espejo family of El Paso, Texas, is like so many others in America in 1967, trying to make sense of a rapidly escalating war they feel does not concern them. But when the eldest son, Gustavo, a complex and errant rebel, receives a certified letter ordering him to report to basic training, he chooses to flee instead to Mexico. Retreating back to the land of his grandfather—a foreign country to which he is no longer culturally connected—Gustavo sets into motion a series of events that will have catastrophic consequences on the fragile bonds holding the family together.
By Cecilia Samartin.
Cousins Alicia and Nora experience profound life changes from different perspectives when Castro's rise to power incites political turbulence and revolution in Cuba, forcing Alicia to flee the country with her parents while Nora remains behind.
By Thomas Sanchez.
Bongo finds his life as an insurance agent in 1957 Havana, Cuba in turmoil after a New Year's Eve bomb goes off in front of the Tropicana nightclub's center stage where his sister, the island's most famous showgirl, is performing.
By Esmeralda Santiago.
An enthralling family saga interlaced with carefully researched details of how the Caribbean economy in the 1800s sustained itself through slave labor
By Silvio Sirias.
The problems faced by homosexuals in Nicaragua are encapsulated in this one case: a woman's murder is deemed a minor offense because she was a lesbian.
By Ignacio Solares ; translated by Timothy G. Compton ; introduction by Carlos Fuentes.
Historical fiction centers on one of the most traumatic periods of Mexican history: the 1847 invasion of Mexico City by American armed forces and the ultimate loss of almost half its territory to the United States. Vivid descriptions capture the streets, cafés, cantinas, and drawing rooms of 19th-century Mexico City.
By Paco Ignacio Taibo II ; translated by William I. Neuman.
Four men who play dominos together in Mexico City in 1922 get involved in a plot to break off a portion of Mexico and give it to U.S. oil barons and corrupt Mexican army officers.
By Luis Alberto Urrea.
This historical novel is based on Urrea's real great-aunt Teresita, who had healing powers and was acclaimed as a saint. Urrea has researched historical accounts and family records for years to get an accurate story.
By Helena María Viramontes.
The life of Mexican fruit pickers in California. The protagonists are a youth who is sprayed with pesticide by a plane and the girl who saves him. The novel describes the harsh conditions under which migrant workers live, the heat, the cramped quarters, the hand-to-mouth existence.
By by Jose Yglesias.
An unabashed skeptic and maverick in society, Yglesias explores the relationship of art and writing to commerce and politics in this savvy novel, which was first published in 1976, but still speaks poignantly to our times.
By Rafael Yglesias.
Enrique and Margaret Sabas have been married for 30 years. Now, Margaret is under hospice care in the final stages of cancer and asks Enrique to control access to her during her final days so that she can say good-bye to a select few on her own terms. Enrique does so, patiently waiting for his own turn. As he waits, he remembers their life together, from their first conversation forward. The story alternates between past and present, contrasting the budding and then mature relationship to the sad reality of its end.
I was reading movie critic David Thomson’s latest, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (2012), and enjoying it so much that I checked out a bunch more of his books including The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, but after a few pages of that one, I decided I'd had enough of Thomson's style for now. Maybe another time.
Many of you may know that this year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. Austen wrote the novel in 1797-98, originally calling it First Impressions. Her father attempted to have it published, but the manuscript was rejected. It was not until her first novel, Sense and Sensibility was published in 1812 that Pride and Prejudice was accepted. By that time, another author had published their novel called First Impressions. Austen found another title for her book from a quote in fellow female author Fanny Burney’s novel, Cecila. Thus Pride and Prejudice was born. The novel was an instant success and has proved to be her most popular novel.
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The 2010 novel 
Summer time in Austin, Texas cannot be defined by the temperature outside. If it were, then we wouldn't have a Fall or Spring. Instead, universities, teachers, parents, and especially students define it by the months-long reprieve from the daily obligations of school. Retailers and restauranteurs mark Summer as when the tourists come to town. For festival goers it is the time between SXSW and ACL. For myself, I like to honor its arrival by joining the Summer Reading Program at my neighborhood branch of the library. Because I continue to work full time during that period of the calendar I can't necessarily devote more time to reading. Therefore, I have adopted my own personal challenge. Each year I have a goal to use the summer months to try a genre I don't normally read. Last year it was graphic novels and the year prior was nonfiction. In doing so, I discovered that I rather enjoy graphic novels and that they include so much more than superheroes. I also learned that I mentally focus much better on nonfiction material when I listen to it rather than read it, especially when it's read by an enthusiastic and passionate author or actor. So far my favorite of these is Michael Pollan, most notably known for Omnivore’s Dilemma, and who has a new one out soon I look forward to trying. I haven't decided yet on this year's genre, but it will undoubtedly be a mind opening experience. The pretty great thing about APL is that no matter which subject matter or material type I choose, I will have tons of titles from which to pick. The other awesome thing about summer reading in Austin is being part of the 
