Languages

In this short lyric piece by Alejandro Zambra, a bed sheet is a blank canvas and a record of family history.   It was before my dad set the house on fire. Fifteen or twenty days before.  There was a closet full of sheets, almost all of them white with red thread at the seams, Italian red. And one light blue set that was mine, patterned with blue letters or treble clefs.  My mother, from the window, her back to me, facing a white sheet; fifteen or twenty days before, back,...

In this short story, Alia Trabucco Zerán spins a tale of class, connection, and human cruelty in Chile.    Neither good nor bad. Neither nice nor unpleasant. Neither short nor long. It was life, period. The cloth wipes the grime. The broom gathers the trash. The water wets the soap. As I already said, the señora, the lady of the house, treated me well. If you ask her, she’ll say she considered me part of the family. Exactly which part I still don’t...

Boyhood friends meet again after years apart, sparking a trip through the narrator’s memory that leads to a forgotten—and harrowing—episode.    Listen to Eduardo Plaza read "Hyenas" in the original Spanish.   1 Miguel Rodewald and I were good friends. We knew each other because his family, who lived in Temuco, used to spend their summers in Coquimbo. When they were kids his father used to rent a house a few blocks from ours, in El Llano. We’d...

Catalina Mena's manifesto confronts the dilemmas facing women forced to choose between private household duties and public endeavors. Listen to Catalina Mena read "The Head of Household Manifesto" in the original Spanish. And if the Head of Household were to draft her manifesto, it would be in the absence of a form that can hold her. And because this same absence left her adrift. Stamped like a Chilean census form. A form that called the Head of Household a national hero. But that...

A girl of seventeen agrees to marry a gringo on their first date. Nothing in this impulsive start to their marriage hints at the coming misfortunes that will tear them from each other and themselves.    Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart. Hosea, 4:11   He said: I know you. You used to live in Ch, near the big port—isn’t your name Carla? I told him he was right except for the name, recognizing the same roughness in his accent as those...

Climbing into bed with her raconteuse grandmother, a young woman anxiously expects another of the old lady’s stories of a bygone Santiago. Instead, she discovers a physical deformity that provokes a reflection on the stories our scars tell of us.     My grandmother had no belly button. I found that out one night when I went into her room without knocking. It was late, I’d woken up from a bad dream and, to feel safe, I walked down the hall, thinking I’d get into...

In Ariel Urquiza's short story, a young man is forced to deliver drugs on his mother's behalf, but after arriving at his clients' party, he finds little motive for celebration.   “What do you want?” Gabriel asked when he opened the door. “I’m Jonathan,” he said. “Renata’s son.” “Wow, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve gotten so big, you’re almost as tall as me. Come on in. It took you a while, I was just...

Uruguayan poet Roberto Echavarren, a personal friend of Ashbery and translator of his work into Spanish, considers Ashbery's poetics and his legacy vis-à-vis other poets in the US and internationally.   The Voice, the Voices Unlike the Beat Poets (Allen Ginsberg in particular), poets of the New York School like James Schuyler and John Ashbery wrote to be read rather than heard. Frank O’Hara was a possible exception, and Schuyler also occasionally declaimed in public...

Panamanian writer Melanie Taylor Herrera looks on as two assassins kill time at a nightclub​.   Two men head for the table in front of the dance floor. They sit down in the aluminum chairs silently and in unison. The man wearing the skintight black shirt orders two drinks. The bar is empty. It’s almost nine on a Wednesday night—a lazy night that slips through the waitresses’ and bartender’s fingers like thick wet sand. The men watch the few...

Panamanian writer Cheri Lewis observes a household inexplicably deluged with infants.   The babies started arriving that summer. I remember the first one so well. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when, in the mirror, I spotted the reflection of a shadow making its way down the hall. I leaned out the door and saw a baby, naked and covered in dirt. He crawled right down the center of the living room and headed straight for my sister, who was sitting on the couch, reading a book....

An anxious woman awaits her lover in Panamanian writer Carlos Oriel Wynter Melo’s exploration of jealousy and doubt​ If you look at the park head on, stare straight at it, look with more than your eyes, imagining it or linking it to a memory, you’ll see a tunnel of trees that ends in a hole of light. If your gaze is colored by some melancholy thought, that spot of light might suggest several interpretations. One possibility is that everything comes to an end. On the...

In this short story, Abilio Estévez's narrator wades into reminiscences of the murky, weed-choked waters of his adolescence in Cuba and an indelible experience with an older friend.   1 This is the story of a small happiness that, for some inexplicable reason, occurred the day I turned sixteen. Now, after such a long time, I can’t be sure if what took place had anything to do with my birthday. In any case it undoubtedly was a Sunday, gray and humid, because I...

In this homage to Juan José Saer, Sergio Chejfec sends a novelist, an essayist, and a theologian on a pilgrimage to the great writer’s final resting place in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery.   Three Argentineans are in Paris one Sunday in spring. They walk through its empty streets as if they had nothing else to do that morning. They think of their families, of the people they’ve momentarily left behind, and of their imminent return to routine: each...

In this 2014 essay, Marcelo Cohen reflects back on decades as a translator in Spain and the complex relationship between translation, exile, and identity.   This text takes as its starting point another that I wrote once for a talk on exile and Argentine literature. But don’t think I’m simply trying to make things easier on myself. Remembering Joyce’s famous motto, “silence, exile, and cunning,” I briefly considered as a title for this chronicle: "On the...

In this essay, literary and cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo takes on the longstanding myth that Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America.   Among the many commonplaces about Buenos Aires, I’ll mention but two. The first panders to the Argentinean ego and is especially inaccurate: Buenos Aires resembles Paris. The second was a criticism that could be heard for decades from the mouths of these same Argentineans who would drive themselves into a frenzy imagining themselves heirs of...

A retiree from one of Argentina’s state-owned companies finds his garden engulfed by the sea one day in this story from recently rediscovered mid-century writer Sara Gallardo​. Once upon a time there was a pensioner with a garden in Lanús. He had been head of personnel at a state-owned company. His garden was the admiration and envy of all Lanús. That’s a zone that, as everyone knows, lacks water two days out of three. The neighborhood writes notes of...

In this excerpt from her first-ever book-length translation into English, Borges contemporary Norah Lange seeks to cast a light onto the enigma of her three mysterious neighbors’ identities.    Despite their excuses, I tried many times to convince them of how easy and convenient it would be for them to communicate, and even call for help, if they had a telephone. “The afternoon I saw you at the post office, it was reassuring to know I could call home and ask someone...

Marco Avilés grapples with questions of difference and discrimination for immigrants in Peru and the US in this essay from his book No soy tu cholo, published in Peru by Debate, an imprint of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. An earlier version appeared originally in Ojo Publico. An American couple relocated to Lima and opened a hamburger joint in one of the city’s culinary hotspots: the formidable Calle Dante, in Surquillo, a neighborhood full of...

A family must learn to adapt when their house takes on a life of its own in this playful homage to Julio Cortázar by Mexican author Yuri Herrera, winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.   &°°° couldn’t be happier. @°°° couldn’t be happier. The twins *~ and #~ couldn’t be happier. Roanoke, the dog, was less enthusiastic, but agreed to lie in a corner of the laundry room, which elegantly hollowed out a spot as...

One of the founding members of the FARC, known as “Sergeant Pascuas,” recalls the origins of the guerrilla movement in the “independent republics,” areas in rural Colombia held by Marxist peasant guerrillas in the 1950s in the aftermath of La Violencia, which lasted from 1948 to 1958. Conservative politicians believed these areas needed to be brought into line with the rest of the country through military force. After an amnesty of 1953, figures such as Juan Cruz...

The poetry of Vito Apushana is a composed of several intersections: between oral and written literatures, between Spanish and Quechua, between the Wayuu people and Colombian society at large. Here, we present his poetry in translation from the Spanish alongside the same poem in Quechua.   WAYUU (II) We are silent joy - the toiling of ants- - the leaping of rabbits- We are placid sadness - the curlew's gaze- - the bat's dream- We are life, this way - the child...

Piedad Bonnett reads "Kitchen" ("Cocina") in the original Spanish.   Cocina                         Para Ma. Victoria. Una cocina puede ser el mundo, un desierto, un lugar para llorar. Estábamos ahí: dos madres conversando en voz muy baja como si hubiera niños durmiendo en las alcobas. Pero no había nadie. Sólo la resonancia del...

The poetry of Fredy Chicangana straddles two languages: Spanish and Quechua. Here, we present his poetry in translation from the Spanish alongside the same poem in Quechua.   BIRD SPIRIT These songs to Mother Earth in a major key are whispers that come from distant forests, those furtive words that yearn to be a droplet in the human heart. They're gentle tones, as if they were telling us: "We come in silence along the moist paths of life, the grass of hope greets us between night...

Bubblegum and Baldy, lackeys for two fraternal gang leaders in gritty Medellín, forge a bond over salsa music and try to find themselves. Baldy’s real name was Arcadio and no one ever knew Bubblegum’s. They were of different ages, races, backgrounds, and temperaments, but they were united by salsa: both were true fanatics and their conversations and even their lives revolved around it. I remember the day the song “Juanito Alimaña” was first played...

Luck of the draw spares one young man while simultaneously condemning his friend to a tragic fate in this short story by Juan Gabriel Vásquez.   Ernesto Wolf. In the class list our surnames were neighbors, because after mine there don’t tend to be too many surnames in Colombia (unless it’s a foreign one or some curiosity: Yáñez or Zapata, Yammara or Zúñiga). The day of the lottery that would or would not send us into the army,...

Reyes offers an acute portrait of the agonies of maternity and the search for our origins in this tale revolving around Spanish mother Belén and her adopted Colombian son, Federico.  Where do babies come from? From desire, she wanted to tell him, as they read aloud, like they did every night: he leaning over the illustrations, with his head of black pompoms so close to her arm, and she thinking how she had imagined him differently. She was going to name her Paloma, she...

In this short story by Juan Álvarez, a young man, forced to confront his Uncle Javier's violence, recounts its effect on his family.   Who has heard my voices? Is it Clotaldo? —Life is a Dream, Calderón de la Barca   I never wanted to sock you in the face, Javier, let’s just get that clear. Things happened the way they did because you left me no choice. Two plus two is four, and four plus two is six, simple as that, and if I’m...

In this excerpt from his novel An Orphan World, Giuseppe Caputo explores the love between a father and son in the midst of poverty, as well as questions surrounding violence and homosexuality.   A butterfly flew down to a dark place; all beautifully colored it seemed; it was hard to tell. MAROSA DI GIORGIO   One night, many moons ago, my father gave me a star. We lived on the breadline, as we do now, in a sad house with next to no furniture. And since the house...

In this short story by Óscar Collazos, two brothers whose parents consider them beyond redemption bond over unspeakable acts and their communal rebellion.   Alberto returned home and went to his room without saying a word, evading Mom’s eyes (What are you doing home? I thought you went to Confession?) and avoiding her questions. Then I thought: Something must have happened to him. I chose to continue on with the sports page, distracting myself by...

Claire, recently returned to Bogotá after years living abroad, visits The House of Beauty in the city’s posh Zona Rosa and is instantly reminded of everything she hates about Bogotá’s racial and class divisions.   1 I hate artificial nails in outlandish colors, fake-blonde hair, cool silk blouses, and diamond earrings at four in the afternoon. Never before have so many women looked like transvestites, or like prostitutes dressing up as good...

A private history of Tres Cruces, Montevideo's main bus terminal where every day thousands of strangers collide, converse, grow bored and even, sometimes, get hitched. Why does Mom always say we shouldn't talk to strangers?   The woman who serves coffee in Montevideo’s central bus station is good at talking to strangers. “Sometimes it’s easier chatting with someone you don’t know,” says Raquel Quirque, a stranger to me, and one with no less than...

Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez examines the violence of urban Guatemala through the anecdotes of its taxi drivers, finding that where they've been is less telling than where they are no longer willing to go.   One asks the questions and the taxi driver responds. After many years of taking taxis, I know that although there are some more inclined to chatter than others, no taxi driver can resist talking about his job. And what does his job involve? Does it involve...

The following excerpt is from Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández's Roza tumba quema, the story of a peasant who dares become a guerrillera at a young age, and the daughters she will have to raise, protect, push forward during constant rural turmoil. The story is inspired by events surrounding the civil war in El Salvador, which raged from 1980 to 1992.   When she turned fourteen, three men came for her at her maternal grandmother's house, with...

I didn't understand what it meant to be a man. If in the past I thought that it was enough to have genitals dangling between one's legs, now I began to doubt. I doubted, because Uncle Marcelo's did dangle but nobody in the village considered him a man. Then would the perfect male be one who fathered children? "Of course not," I answered myself. My grandfather fulfilled that function and, in the opinion of my grandmother, he shouldn't be considered a man because he had shown...

That it is ridiculous to speak of joy that “the promised land” does not exist that our rage will find no calm. All this I know. —Reinaldo Arenas   Yes, I introduced them, but that was all. Everything that happened afterward, what they said, I swear it’s not true, sugar. Úrsula was on the other side of the tracks when I met Tomás, so it was me he saw first. He looked at me and said, Going North? We became traveling companions, and—this...

          I That sturdy show time still surprises, assaults, unsettles words. All was not said nor did you then dress your gaze in blue. All was not said, the rain a kind of tango. It was dawn.                                                             II             ...

The Argentine national food is the asado. I won’t go on about its mystery and metaphors, because that tends to be mere decoration, sometimes exaggerated, other times just rubbernecking. Really, it’s a simple custom. You cook meat on a parrilla (grill), or on a disc, or even stuck onto metal spears if the asado is out in the open. In Argentina, we eat the whole cow. Its intestines, which we call chinchulines. Its glands, or sweetbreads, which we call mollejas and are...

Dreadful is the condition of the castaway better schooled in gastrosophy than shipwreckology. Predisposed to survive on what lies within my reach and in my reportoire, should I long for oven-roasted oysters with zucchini, a rock lobster with fresh favas, striped bass with celery, cabbage, and vinegar, red mullet filets with rosemary cream, breaded mullet with oysters, even a little dish of oysters Girardet, what materials do I have to attain an acceptable result? Neither wine for deglazing...

Alejandro Saravia charts the life and death of a rookie dealer on the mean streets of Montreal on a corner on avenue Decelles a Caribbean man finds an abandoned mattress where he can sleep and dream that he speaks French and English that he wears the best brands that he owns 24-karat gold bracelets that he has women to spare and drives a brand-new Mercedes drawn by the myth of the streets of gold Santiago Nasar arrives on rue Barclay and becomes a pusher in his pocket the niveous ecstasy...

José Ignacio Valenzuela’s distrustful woman debates whether she ought to allow a stranger into her home.       Characters WOMAN MAN NEWSCASTER (voiceover) A living room with a small sofa, a television set switched on, and a door. There’s an old- fashioned phone beside the TV. We hear the sound of rainstorm: thunder and lightning. A woman is sitting on the sofa watching the TV. VOICEOVER OF THE NEWSCASTER  The police have issued no statements...

Miguel Alcantud and Santiago Molero present the mysterious call-and-response of a nameless man and the woman who appears to be holding him captive.    Characters HIM HER The room appears to be a bedroom but with a bit of everything thrown in. It looks like a kind of basement area or shed, although it is well set up. There is a bed, a piece of low furniture that could be a dresser or chest of drawers, and a chair. As the audience enters a man can be seen...

Gabriela Wiener finds romantic safety in numbers.  I never got the knack of fidelity. Ever since I first experienced pleasure outside the four walls of our tacky bathroom, I’ve continually violated the most sacred pacts of love. At first I put this down to my lack of character or inability to assert my desires in relation to an Other, to have some coherence in my life. How could I enjoy properly transgressive sex without sacrificing Sunday movie nights and breakfasts in bed? How...

Machos in the Metro I’m always aware of who’s around me in the metro. For two reasons. One is that I like to snap pics of hot guys without them realizing. I pretend to be texting or browsing Facebook, but I’m actually capturing portraits of raw masculinity: an unshaven square jaw, a bulge at the crotch of some sweatpants, the biceps of a guy holding onto the pole when the car starts to slow down. And it’s an even bigger turn-on because they’re not aware of my...

stone over stone s i l e n c e   il pleut aujourd’hui au Fort Chambly il pleut exactement comme il pleuvait il y a 400 ans il pleut comme il pleuvait il y a 1 400 ans il pleut comme il pleuvait il y a 11 400 ans 11 400 années de pluie as rain falls this afternoon a man in wet clothes stares at stone over stone the low clouds, the rain in s i l e n c e   Louis XVI reinaba en Francia en Nueva Francia llovía sobre las piedras y los bosques sobre la piel del...

the flowers of war open at night on boulevard Saint-Laurent a line from Lorca a word from Castellanos a body unharmed by the siege of Sarajevo a bomb that didn’t explode in Hanoi or Baghdad and the sweet lips of women in winter are enough to make dawn bear fruit on this corner on boulevard Saint-Laurent best if you don’t know who you are best if you don’t know where you’re from best if you don’t know where you’re going the boulevard’s flowers in...

a man standing on the tracks stares at a train as it advances with a moan of metal and night the iron moves the blind diesel thrusts the siren wails the feverish headlight lights up and splits the chest of the earth and forest but the man stays still before the apparatus still ten meters left and he just stares and stares at the invention that will chop him split him shatter him he lacks no strength or ability     to thrust his body to one side he can jump run dodge save...

Mexican-Canadian author Martha Batiz tells an extraordinary story about a mother and her ill-fated septuplet daughters.   Across the entire region, people spoke about Doña Toña’s multiple births for weeks. Seven strong and healthy baby girls had issued from their mother’s swollen belly, screaming at the top of their lungs. No sooner had Doña Toña finished breastfeeding the lot of them than a ravenous appetite roared again in those who were...

Herson Tissert Pérez reads “Project DreamReal.”  1 The individual who greeted me in the building’s lobby didn’t much resemble the one pictured in the advertising leaflets. He seemed less physically imposing, and his smile, cordial and welcoming in the leaflets, now struck me as that of a man with some kind of secret to conceal. Nevertheless, my excitement was so great that I followed him unhesitatingly down a network of hallways and staircases until,...

“I don’t like ballet,” the doctor admitted. “OK,” Nicanor said, “but it’s different with me. It’s not that I don’t like sports, it’s that they don’t make any sense to me. Like I wouldn’t understand a salmon explaining why it has to migrate. I just don’t get a stadium full of people screaming with enthusiasm or outrage about eight guys who bang a leather ball around better than the other eight.”...

To my love, the Tramontana wind that shook my life forever. A book is a bottle flung into the sea. I want my books to reach the bleeding hands of  castaways. —Samuel Feijóo I found an old mining asteroid of no interest to anyone, rented it for a few Federation kopeks, and built a bar that matches your eyes, though you’re not here. I searched through the tangle of collapsing tunnels until I came upon exactly the right space, its acoustics perfect for your voice. I...

For Erelvis Jiménez and Roberto Armas Saladrigas This exquisite dessert, so emblematic of our era of space conquest, dates back to the 2103 recipe by Iljon Tichy, though some detractors of the celebrated cosmonaut refuse to accept this theory on the grounds that there’s no mention of the now-legendary delicacy in any of the many volumes of Tichy’s well-known Star Diaries. Great is human envy . . . and extraterrestrial envy is even greater. What remains undisputed...

For Elisú   I walk into the bank, check in hand, and ask a security guard whether I can cash it. He takes my question to another man who might be a plainclothes guard, then comes back to tell me 1) that I can indeed cash my check at this branch, and 2) that the computer connections have been going down a lot today. I don’t know exactly what this means in technical terms, but I soon see the practical result: slow at the best of times, the bank is putting its full capacity...

Years ago, there was a doctor who lived in our town, a wealthy widower. The only family he had left was a beautiful daughter, blond as beer, named Cleis. He had a bad heart and was worried that he’d die and leave his little girl all alone, so he married his housekeeper, a respectable widow who had two daughters named Lotta and Regan, and who seemed very fond of Cleis. I knew that scheming bitch didn’t love Cleis. Far from it. She hated the poor girl and was just faking it. But...

Father traded his life savings for this hole in the waste-recycling compartment. Of course there’s not much space. Anela, Soulness, and I are getting cramped arms and stiff necks, we’re steeping in each other’s hot breath. But we couldn’t have asked for more from our old man. Trembling, he placed the two mega-credits in the spaceport attendant’s gloved hands. He trembled because he feared our trip would be thwarted and we’d have no chance at a second...

“where we are is hell, / And where hell is must we ever be.” —Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus   It is one of those mornings when it’s hard for her to get out from under the sheets, as if her body weighed more than usual. Tons weighing down her arms and each of the hairs on her legs. She rubs her right eye with three slow swipes of the hand, her elbow grazing her husband’s back. He barely stirs; his body, sunk into the mattress, hardly...

Overwhelmed by the weight of oblivion, she plunged one leg into the bathtub full of warm water, flowers and leaves that chased away the pain living inside her . . . fortunately, the herbal bath relieved her aching body and the sores spreading across her skin.   Still standing there with one leg navigating the tiny ocean she had designed at the end of the bedroom, she caught a glimpse of the world lying in wait outside her window. Her other leg hung suspended in the surrounding cold; a...

Bilbao rose to meet them, swathed in stagnant drizzle. At the door to the train station, the old woman opened her umbrella and stepped outside, with the girl walking snug against her body. The damp fog blurred the outlines of the city. Objects appeared menacingly distant, and the people seemed to be walking an inch off the ground. The old woman tied her black kerchief under her chin without dropping the basket hung over her arm. She was dressed in an old village woman’s prim mourning...

This is the third installment in a three-part fiction serial of Peruvian writer Carlos Yushimito's short story "Lessons for a Boy Who Arrived Late," translated by Valerie Miles. You can read the first installment here and the second installment here.   5. The day the farming truck crushed Papá’s car the hunting had been bountiful; the marmalade jar had struck and stirred up the tight body of an earthworm colony. We trapped at least fifty of them but I had to...

3 I hated how Margarita cracked her knuckles when it was her turn to play the piano. She knew the sound of cracked nuts when she laced her fingers together and twisted them triggered a slight nervous twitch I wasn’t able to conceal. But it wasn’t only to bother me that she popped her joints like snail shells underfoot; in fact, she meant it as a reminder of how much happier both of us were outdoors and not underneath that roof. But to maintain the serene course of things,...

  Wilfredo Inuma is the chief of an indigenous Amazonian community. But above all, he is the guardian of the lavatory. Wilfredo founded the Shipibo community of Bena Gema twelve years ago, together with 150 families fleeing the misery of the jungle. They settled in the outskirts of the city of Pucallpa, capital of the Peruvian region of Ucayali. They wanted schools for their children. And jobs. Wilfredo has worked guarding oil company facilitiess against attacks by locals. He has...

The fat man was interesting. A tourist, of course, who had only come to Qoyllur Rit’i to rubberneck. Zimm had seen him on previous days down on the plain below the ice, walking around the campsites set up most recently on the Sinakara depression. There was no mistaking his shape; Zimm figured he must weigh at least three hundred pounds, which ruled him out as a typical festival pilgrim. Plus, the fat man hadn’t brought altar candles with him up to the still night-darkened ice,...

On the first attempt, the trigger jammed. The prisoner wasn’t afraid, and in fact felt a sort of indifference that seemed, in light of the brutality of the instant, to have been there all along, his whole life, quietly lurking behind each of his experiences as though awaiting the ideal moment to surface. Behind him, the footsteps of the soldier, his executioner, rang out: rapid-fire, ready to finish off the job. Then the cold of the steel touched the back of his head for the second...

“We die from the moment we’re born, but only say we die when we’ve reached the end of that process, and sometimes that end lasts an awfully long time.” Thomas Bernhard, Breath Mariana Speranza! It’s been four years since I last heard my name. I’d almost forgotten what it sounded like. Someone knocks on the door three times. The last time I heard it was on a Thursday, four years ago, as I was leaving the office. It was my last day of work. I resigned. I...

I cut my sister’s hair today the locks fell like huge tears against the baseboards I swept it up and tossed it in the trash All that dead hair has filled my dreams One day I dreamt of dead hair  The strands all joined back together They ganged up and demanded I account for my sad deed I was silent, dumbstruck The dead hair insisted: Are you there? Why did you butcher me? I gathered up the hair and my sister’s face appeared floating in the distance Why did you throw my hair...

1 We sensed that a shadow had caressed the door, but it couldn’t be the cat. My sister Candelaria was the first to notice it. She stopped playing the piano nearly at the same time. I had been observing a colossal painting that hung on the wall of the salon, feeling somnolent from the lesson’s stammering repetition. The painting was of a nude woman reclining beside a grotto, scarcely veiled by the modesty of her hair, one of her hands fallen to her side, like a leaf. I found it...

At first she stared at the window for a while, as her life paraded past in scenes: her mother’s house in Piura, the silent sun high over Piura’s dusty rooftops, which bristled with aluminum antennas marking the luminously streaked sky. Her mother’s house that smelled of Bolívar soap and rue plants beneath the gold sun that hung in the taut, infinite sky. She missed it all, but she was in Paris and there was nothing she could do about it. That was the harsh truth....

The recording and transcript below make up one example of the oral storytelling traditions of Peru, this one from the Tikuna, the most numerous tribe in the Amazon. The recording is made in the Tikuna language. José Fernando Muratú, narrator. 1Nguxtapax went out hunting; it was his second time going out hunting. When he came back from the hunt the kids were bathing in the ravine. 2“Nguxtapax tütütü ãῧbrikari tütütü,...

So it all boils down to this. A whole morning seeing my face and Paulo’s on the television screen. Ten reporters camped out at the entrance to the building. Three policemen on phone-tap duty, reading the soccer pages in the dining room. They might get in touch at any moment. Waiting is all that’s left for me. I’ve called Lucía to tell her that, obviously, I won’t be doing the program today. She started to cry. This can’t be happening to you, she...

Frail before the squalor             squalor being a feeble answer the everyday self gives its own abjections it surprises me to be in a city whose name like the humidity that clings to its ancient walls or like its tubercular pigeons means nothing to me any more than being inside its plastic image as I sink into La Defense or lose myself in the ardor of its past      oh the purity the freshness of withered things...

Audio courtesy of Literatura Sonora. We look like funerary bundles dug out of our graves. There are ten or twelve people sitting on the room’s floor, in a circle, and in the dark. The healer is at the center. He is smoking a mapacho—tobacco typically found in the forests of Peru—and exhales the smoke above the rim of a bottle filled with a viscous liquid. He takes a sip, and then calls us one by one. I’m afraid. Those who have taken ayahuasca before say the...

I grew up in a country at war. I still remember clearly a month in 1990 in which twelve bombs exploded near my house in Lima, one every two or three days. Peru was living through its worst years of violence, and the Shining Path—the dangerous terrorist group that controlled a large part of the Andean region—had succeeded in descending from the mountains to the coast, and was very close to dealing the final blow. Lima, at the edge of the sea, was preparing for a siege by the...

Downstairs my dad’s real upset and he says when he gets his hands on those people he’s going to beat the crap out of them. My mom and María Fe are crying and going on about how could something like this have happened. Apparently someone’s stolen Dieguito’s body, his grave has been desiccated or something like that. I’m not allowed to go downstairs myself because they say I’m too small, but I know loads of things and I’m sure they’re...

What’s real isn’t this thing or that thing my presents that you gave away once they lost the weight and sheen of being given and became no more than fragile objects. What’s real isn’t our clumsy lies or the bodies of others we barely dare to touch. Nor is it doubt—it can’t be doubt— nor can it be hatred, fear, fatigue. My bet is that what’s real is infinitely beautiful. There is a false time set in motion when we fall, but true time is the...

Then my father asks what my plans are and I make the mistake of telling him that Ignacio’s girlfriend is coming by so we can go for lunch. “And he’s not going?” Dad asks. “He’s away,” I say. He says nothing. I struggle to picture him on the other end of the line. “Dad?” I ask, hearing him grunt. “Don’t you go fooling around with her,” he says. I didn’t expect this from him, let alone in these terms....

The boy looked at them again, though without any sign of recognition or comprehension. Then his eyes scrunched closed, his mouth opened, and he howled until he had no more air in his lungs. His face seemed to relax and soften then. His lips parted as his last breath was puffed through his throat and exhaled gently through the clenched teeth. —Raymond Carver, “A Small, Good Thing” I Closing the book of short stories, I get up from the armchair and go into Isabel's...

All Sor Juana scholars differ on something. Differ among themselves. Differ on something, usually everything. For example The reasons Sor Juana took the veil. The reasons Sor Juana wrote the Carta Atenagórica. The reasons Sor Juana finally recanted. Or also, for example: The real last name of Sor Juana. The real meaning of “Primero sueño.” The real nature of her relationship with the Marquesa de Paredes alias Lysi. Mainly this: all Sor Juana scholars tend to...

One day the two of them will be going around the drugstores, greedy for pills to bring back the days they’ve dumped in the trash, thought Romero. What a waste, being young: someone tells them that they have their whole lives ahead of them, and what do they do? Put on a mask and parrot the speeches dictated to them by some other character who they imagine knows how to be happy. Morons. The bride and groom were making their tour of the tables, smiling at the throng of strangers who had...

I am sitting under an open sky in the city where I was born. This spot I chose is part of the old cemetery, and these words I write will end up forming both my testimony and my epitaph. I know full well that the art historians will misinterpret me. They can have their pound of flesh as long as I reach my intended audience. I’ll start from the top: 3, 2, 1. My name is Amauro Montiel. I grew up not far from here, but a fair distance farther up: in a housing block on the Third Urban...

Perhaps the first time there was something altogether amusing in the matter. Even Zapata, el gordo, always so serious, always so gloomy, cracked himself up when García Urquijo, who was gazing out of the window during the first five minutes of the blackout, asked, why two candles, man, we have no idea how long this will last. He said it with his back turned, without addressing anyone in particular. Clutching his whiskey, Ramiro blew out the candle next to him in the same exact moment...

For Alfredo Brigada Monjaraz and Carlos Pérez-Tejada y Salazar, in memoriam 1872 The bronze bell in the mechanical brain rang, pulling Prince Salm Salm away from the security report he had been reading. There appeared on the spherical screen, which always reminded him of a submarine diving helmet, an electronic message.   Through the window of his office in Chapultepec Castle, he could see a pair of dirigibles slipping like lazy manatees through the clouds that covered the...

Vanoli’s campy cyberpunk roadtrip follows two low-ranking members of a barrabrava or soccer hooligan gang, which are entirely female in Vanoli’s bleak future some indeterminate number of decades from now. In the intervening decades, the Argentine countryside has been rendered massively toxic while the gritty urban landscape, for the lumpen protagonists, looks eerily contemporary save for a few advances in medical and drug technologies. The girls team up with a rural motorcycle...

This is an IMAGINARY STORY . . . aren't they all? ALAN MOORE History is ours, and it is made by the people. SALVADOR ALLENDE   On the night of September 9, Manuel Contreras Valdebenito wakes up screaming in his bed. Something spoke to him in his dreams: treason, life imprisonment, dishonor. An expression traveling through time. On the road to Damascus. The next day, he picks up the phone and makes a call. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and Gonzalo Leigh Meza are arrested under the...

This story is the worst story in the world—it's just terrible. For those who don't like tragic stories, this book has a happy ending on a page near the end. I recommend you don't keep reading after it. * My mother always told me that there are books that are not for children. I didn't understand this until yesterday, when I secretly read the book my father is writing. * The Book of Denial his book is called . . . but, it wasn't because of the title that I...

I’ll talk about something else never that I’m not going to tell you enough! I’m going to draw this subtle paradise of paper that doesn’t mention lice or dreams a look back at a brief childhood I’m going to talk about hammocks and rosaries I assume you don’t pray and you never slept in a hammock yesterday tomorrow never I won’t keep a tally bruises that go away go inwards to explode again in the faces of children your children and ad eternum...

the nail fell, making the floor shriek i aim to fix the hole by filling it with paper wad it up a little and stuff it in it can’t fail i push it in deeper it falls through, into a void i try again but with bigger paper it falls through i write tiny poems and toss them into the new mailbox on my wall i explain the lack of plaster to whomever might see it:   children who fall from bed latent madness the freedom of abandonment...

I Linguistics in the time of Uruguayan invasion. When nobody cared about linguistics, before France, before Saussure, when nobody could have imagined a human being might ever think about             linguistics. II They planted flags. Loyally they defended their country to the limit and far beyond it was linguistics. III Linguistics isn’t a resource that’ll ever carry a nation to             glory. In fact, the glory...

It was as though she knew exactly where she had to go, as though it was an agreed appointment. She raised her arm to take my hand, pulled gently—she did almost everything gently—and I followed her. She led me to her mother’s car (her mother was not around), and I helped her up into the child seat. “So, off to the zoo.” “Yes,” she said. “Eagle! Lion!” The zoo seemed to be empty. Alone, in the middle of the main path, a roadsweeper was...

This one’s family, Amir would say with a hand on my shoulder, his fingers large and heavy but kind. The other person would look at me, then look at him, then smile slightly before putting out his hand and saying it was a real pleasure to meet any relative of Amir’s. Later, when they knew each other better, Amir would explain to the person that he was actually my stepfather, that’s why we didn’t look alike. But that’s how Amir was, not overly careful when it...

“Did you hear that noise?” the woman whispered, leaning on one elbow in bed, and opening her eyes wide. “What noise?” her husband asked sleepily. “It sounds like it’s coming from the yard. There’s someone on the roof, or in the kitchen,” she said fearfully. “Get up. Go check on the kids, while I get my pistol,” he ordered in a hushed voice and woke up entirely. While the woman quickly tiptoed to the children’s room the...

Days drift away slowly and quietly deep inside Guatemala. No inner musings. No pondering or ideas. Just a numbing silence, which reminds me of Buddhists and their thoughts about beginners’ minds that are forever capable of wonder. There’s something here that eludes my grasp . . . But in the snapshot instant when the plunging frigidity of Lake Atitlán pitches me into the arms of another reality, I suddenly understand. Perhaps the Mayas really do suspend this land from a...

I used to think it an exaggeration that Latin American dictators were always depicted as apes in cartoons. Until one day . . . On the railway track, hundreds of soldiers appeared in their camouflage gear, several armored cars blocked the crossroads, and up in the sky hovered two of those birds. It was Sunday. A football match was being played out in the field, there were drunks in the cantinas, and a sweet marimba was playing at a party. All of a sudden, everything felt like a Monday....

Papá gave me this notebook. It’s so you can draw life, he told me from bed, and write, when you learn how to write, he said, his eyes sunken deep, as I played on the rug. He gave me the notebook because I told him about the bird that crossed the street at the crosswalk and about the red spider with little antennas. Spiders don’t have antennas, he said, smiling, and I said this one did, it was probably a different insect, he said, and I replied that it was not, that it...

Every time I go back to Guatemala City I make a stop at Avenida Bolívar, the capital's main thoroughfare, with all the reverence of a mourner at a cemetery. The ravenous traffic, and the blue, green, and red houses, whose doors swing open and shut as the busy, hot-blooded people come and go, are all nothing but shadows; other figures, more substantial, more alive, emerge within me. I feel the urge to cry out, but go along quietly, and if on occasion I have wept then it's...

He rested in wildflower-whelmed cemeteries in the yards of wooden churches. —José Antonio Ramos Sucre, “El peregrino de la fe” When I chanced upon a weblog, whose text was also written out longhand in John Alejandro’s notebook, I discovered how the circumstances surrounding the strange case of María de los Ángeles could be reconstructed, or an idea put forward of what might have happened, by applying the speculative techniques of certain gothic...

In Cuba, I was an exiled writer. First, because I wanted to isolate myself from that pair of collective hypnoses called the literary field and the national tradition. In Cuba, I didn't need to sail so much as to sink my way upstream. To think dangerously. To fight against the consensuses of the correct, the same in aesthetics as in politics. To be a freak. To practice the word till it was made unknown and, thereby, recognizable. Like someone who invents a new language and must imagine...

The one banished by poverty lives heartless in far-off lands and cares for nothing as if it were his and is sullen and tired under the heavens. The one who leaves his house defeated and is dragged along by the murmur of people and empty wanders the street and sits in front of a machine. The one grieved by reason who faces a life that dies still hoping and does not return. To this one whom no one ever bade farewell and who one day takes the train toward dawn. No one will know him, his story...

Mauricio Álvarez, better known as La Madison, takes a small mirror from his bag. As he combs his wispy bleached blonde hair, he says he realized he was gay at the age of seven, while reading a Superman comic. “As soon as I saw Clark Kent, I just flipped,” he says, spluttering with laughter. With a look of mock astonishment on his face, John Jairo Murillo, nicknamed La Ñaña, says this is the “gayest confession” he has heard in all his...

Having recently translated By Night The Mountain Burns, by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, I am acutely aware of what a forgotten place Equatorial Guinea is. Whenever I talk about what I’ve been working on, I’m met with blank looks: most people have never heard of Equatorial Guinea, let alone know that it’s Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. In the UK, mention of the failed 2004 coup, led by the British former SAS officer Simon Mann and involving Sir Mark...

“A bitch like that would make any man proud. Look at those tits, bursting forth in need of a man’s touch. They’re calling to me, baby.” It was nine o’clock in the morning, half an hour after I was supposed to start work, according to the powers that be. Squeezed into the backseat of a taxi with three other people, I was roused from my daily hangover by a dull thud. The young driver, himself the worse for drink, stuck his head back inside the car. He’d...

Like all the inhabitants on our Atlantic island, we lived in the big village during the rainy season and went to the settlements in the dry season, to eat whatever we could find there. The house in the big village was full of women, my grandparents having had only daughters. We children were the offspring those women had brought into the world and, as they were all about the same age, and saw that their mother, our grandmother, was still fit and strong, they had us believe that grandmother...