Showing results by narrator "Armando Durán" in All Categories

Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, finished writing The Captain's Verses in 1952 while in exile on the island of Capri - the paradisiacal setting for the blockbuster film Il Postino ( The Postman). Surrounded by sea, sun, and Capri's natural splendors, Neruda addressed these poems to his lover, Matilde Urrutia, before they were married, but he didn't publish them publicly until 1963.

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city's subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before.

A group of U.S. soldiers emailed their observations and experiences from Iraq and their candid opinions on fighting an insurgency. This book is the result. This startling collection of emails is a thoughtful and compelling narrative that carries the reader from the alleys and city streets to the homes of long-suffering Iraqis, and from the soldiers’ concrete bunkers to the “majestic” army base.

It's 2004 in Muriga, a quiet town in Spain's northern Basque Country, a place with more secrets than inhabitants. Five years have passed since the kidnapping and murder of a young local politician - a family man and father - and the town's rhythms have almost returned to normal. But in the aftermath of the Atocha train bombings in Madrid, an act of terrorism that rocked the nation and the world, the townspeople want a reckoning of Muriga's own troubled past.

Nelson’s fate is slowly revealed through the investigation of the narrator, a young man obsessed with Nelson’s story - and perhaps closer to it than he lets on. In sharp, vivid, and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a compulsively readable narrative and a provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices.

New Year’s Eve, 1975. Two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the mythical, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later, they are still on the run. The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through our darkening universe.

Mexico, 1910. The landscape pulses with the force of the upcoming revolution, an atmosphere rich in opportunity for a criminal such as Rawbone. His fortune arrives across the haze of the Sierra Blanca in the form of a truck loaded with weapons. Rawbone sees no other option and agrees to the deal - but he fails to recognize the true identity of Agent Lourdes, a man from deep within his past.

Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author's death, in 2003, Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño's last, unfinished novel. The novel follows Oscar Amalfitano - an exiled Chilean university professor and widower - through the maze of his revolutionary past, his relationship with his teenage daughter, Rosa, his passion for a former student, and his retreat from scandal in Barcelona. Forced to leave Barcelona for Santa Teresa, a Mexican city close to the U.S. border where women are being killed in unprecedented numbers, Amalfitano soon begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry Rivers paintings.

Funny Bones tells the story of how the amusing calaveras - skeletons performing various everyday or festive activities - came to be. They are the creation of Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe (Lupe) Posada (1852-1913). In a country that was not known for freedom of speech, he first drew political cartoons, much to the amusement of the local population but not the politicians. He continued to draw cartoons throughout much of his life, but he is best known today for his calavera drawings.

He was a legend with a blood price on his head both north and south of the border; a renegade black West Point man now living among the hostile bronco Apaches and waging a war of vengeance against two governments. But when a courageous Mestizo priest with a desperate dream needed a man of strength to fulfill his vision, there was only one warrior fierce enough to whom to turn. It was the one they called the Black Apache.

A former U.S. senator vanishes days after his son goes missing. When they're both found dead on a golf course in Mexico with body parts missing, the senator's estranged daughter Rebecca resolves to discover what happened. When it looks like the daughter may become the next victim, private investigator Cape Weathers takes up the case.

Peter Quince was a fighter born and bred. Orphaned at a young age, he remembered an old woman saying that he was a bad one and would cause a lot of trouble in the world. Others claimed he had bad blood, and it would show up sooner or later. But Bill Andrews felt a connection with the boy, took him home, and raised him as one of his own despite his wife's misgivings. Peter soon learned he could manipulate people by withholding his true feelings. He had learned that battles should be won by cunning and strength, with cunning being far more important.

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis may have committed murder. The alert was first raised at six in the morning: A fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than 10” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all 10 were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not 10 but 87. And there were seven survivors.

Bombs fall over a Greek village during World War II, and a teacher takes her students to a cave for shelter. There she tells them about another war - when the Greeks besieged Troy. Day after day, she recounts how the Greeks suffer from thirst, heat, and homesickness, and how the opponents meet - army against army, man against man. Helmets are cleaved, heads fly, blood flows. And everything had begun when Prince Paris of Troy fell in love with king of Sparta Menelaus's wife, the beautiful Helen, and escaped with her to his homeland.

On the day of Joseph Conrad's death, in 1924, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail - from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Those intimate recollections became Nostromo, a novel that solidified Conrad’s fame and turned Altamirano’s reality into a work of fiction. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear. Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence.

Young lovers Héctor and Lilia dreamed of a brighter future for their family in the United States. Héctor left Mexico first to secure work and housing. But when Lilia crossed the border with their infant daughter, Alejandra, mother and child were separated, and Alejandra disappeared. Now, four years later, back in their sleepy hometown of Oaxaca, the couple enjoys a semblance of normal life, with a toddler son and another baby on the way.

In this mesmerizing sequel to a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, the "heart-stealing heroine" (Amy Tan) and muse of Cuban musician Nestor Castillo takes readers on the journey of a lifetime with this story of reinvention, romance, and revolution. In Beautiful...

Brought to you by Penguin. Juan Diego’s little sister is a mind reader. As a teenager, he struggles to keep anything secret – Lupe knows all the worst things that go through his mind. And sometimes she knows more. What a terrible burden it is to know – or to think you know – your future...

In the court of the “King”, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part narco-lit romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.

Dark Dude captures New York City in the 1960s - violent, decaying, slouching away from the American dream - and brings to life a character who has no choice but to head out west in search of something better. But, when Rico and his ex-druggie friend arrive in Wisconsin, they discover that picket-fenced apple-pie people can be just as violent and judgmental as the neighbors they left behind.