Edith Grossman
2) Don Quixote
Author
Language
English
Description
Don Quixote is a middle-aged gentleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. After a first failed adventure, he sets out on a second one with a somewhat befuddled laborer named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his faithful squire. In return for Sanchoʹs services,...
Author
Language
English
Description
An elderly journalist decides to celebrate his 90th year in a grand way, giving himself a present that will make him feel like he's still alive: a young virgin. In the brothel of a picturesque town, the moment comes where he sees the girl from the back, completely naked, and his life changes radically. Now that he meets her he finds himself close to dying, not of old age, but rather of love.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In colonial South America, the doomed love of a 12-year-old girl and a priest thrice her age sent to exorcise her. She is a nobleman's daughter who has been bitten by a rabid dog. The authorities decide she is possessed by the devil and lock her up in a convent. By the author of Love in the Time of Cholera.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In 1916, the Irish nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his extraordinary life to improving the plight of oppressed peoples around the world--especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon--but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposés. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique's wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique's lawyer and...
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1997.
Language
English
Description
This astonishing book by the Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez chronicles the 1990 kidnappings of ten Colombian men and women - all journalists but one - by the Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar. The carefully orchestrated abductions were Escobar's attempt to extort from the government its assurance that he, and other narcotics traffickers, would not be extradited to the United States if they were to surrender.
From the highest corridors of government...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love story whose participants may be the fictional characters of Don Rigoberto. With his usual sly assurance, Vargas Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from the Don's imagination; the resulting novel, an aggregate of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling.
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
2011.
Language
English
Description
The severed head of Josuãe Nadal, floating in the Pacific Ocean off the shore of Mexico, remembers his life, his friends, enemies, and lovers, and his involvement in the drug trade and the corruption frequently encountered in his country.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer's son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
1996.
Language
English
Description
"In this novel, simultaneous plot lines ranging from an investigation by Corporal Lituma of a mysterious disappearance, to his deputy's love affair with a prostitute, to an Andean community terrorized by Shining Path guerrillas, and the alternating first- and third-person narrators all obscure coherence. Grossman's lazy translation needlessly retains large doses of original Spanish lexicon. An introduction, maps, and a translator's note are badly...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Havana, 1957. On the same day that the mafia capo Umberto Anastasia is assassinated in a barber's chair in New York, a hippopotamus escapes from the zoo and is shot and killed by its pursuers. Assigned to cover the zoo story, Joaquin Porrata, a young Cuban journalist, finds himself embroiled in the mysterious connections between the hippo's and mafioso's deaths in this intoxicating story of murder, mobsters, and, finally, love.
Author
Series
Publisher
Yale University Press
Pub. Date
[2010]
Language
English
Description
"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its...
Author
Publisher
Picador USA
Pub. Date
2002.
Language
English
Description
Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
A successful insurance company owner whose two lazy sons want him permanently out of the way crosses paths with a blackmail victim in Peru.
"The Discreet Hero, follows two fascinating characters whose lives are destined to intersect: neat, endearing Felícito Yanaqué, a small businessman in Piura, Peru, who finds himself the victim of blackmail; and Ismael Carrera, a successful owner of an insurance company in Lima, who cooks up a plan to avenge...
19) Red April
Author
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Pub. Date
2009.
Language
English
Description
A chilling political thriller set at the end of Peru's grim war between Shining Path terrorists and a morally bankrupt government counterinsurgency.
Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a by-the-book prosecutor wading through life. Two of his greatest pleasures are writing mundane reports and speaking to his long-dead mother. Everything changes, however, when he is asked to investigate a bizarre and brutal murder:
20) The bad girl
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2007.
Language
English
Description
Presents the story of a love affair between a Peruvian translator and an adventurous and independent woman, "the bad girl," as it unfolds over the course of forty years, from Lima to London, Paris, Tokyo, and Madrid.