Juan Jose is especial. He speaks Spanish at home and English at school. Juan Jose likes enchiladas verdes and he likes pepperoni pizza.

Islanders and Empire examines the role smuggling played in the cultural, economic, and socio-political transformation of Hispaniola from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. With a rare focus on local peoples and communities, the book analyzes how residents of Hispaniola actively negotiated and transformed the meaning and reach of imperial bureaucracies and institutions for their own benefit. By co-opting the governing and judicial powers of local and imperial institutions on the island, residents could take advantage of, and even dominate, the contraband trade that reached the island's shores. In doing so, they altered the course of the European inter-imperial struggles in the Caribbean by limiting, redirecting, or suppressing the Spanish crown's policies, thus taking control of their destinies and that of their neighbors in Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish empire in the region.

Goya was the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns. The Black Paintings presage surrealism and other aspects of the 20th century artistic vision. The series forms a star part of the Prado's collections.

Publishers Weekly “Top 10 Book of the Year” selection “Begins as entertaining slapstick, subtly metamorphoses into fable. . . . As [the narrator’s] vivid imaginary world fuses with reality this deceptively ethereal novel advances toward a dark and startling finale.” —Wall Street Journal Laid off from his job, Damián Lobo obsessively imagines himself as a celebrity being interviewed on TV. After committing an act of petty theft at an antiques market, he finds himself trapped inside a wardrobe and delivered to the seemingly idyllic home of a husband, wife, and their internet-addicted teenage daughter. There, he sneaks from the shadows to serve as an invisible butler, becoming deeply and disastrously involved with his unknowing host family. Every thread of the plot is ingeniously tied together, creating a potent admixture of parable, love story, and thriller. Millás masterfully reveals the everyday as innately surreal as he renders the unbelievable tangible and the trivial fantastical, and full of dark humor. Juan José Millás is the recipient of Spain’s most prestigious literary prizes: the Premio Nadal, Premio Planeta, and Premio Nacional de Narrativa. A regular contributor to El País, Millás has also won many awards for his journalism. He is the author of several short story collections and works of nonfiction as well as over a dozen novels, including From the Shadows, the first of his novels to be published in North America. He lives in Madrid.

The Shark and the Sardines is a scathing allegorical short story by Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (1904-1990), who was the first of the reformist presidents of Guatemala (1944-1951). As a country that had seen a series of dictatorships following its independence from Spain, Arévalo’s 1944 election is considered by historians to be the first fair and democratic election in Guatemala’s republican history. Arévalo’s administration was marked by unprecedented relatively free political life during his six-year term. An educator and philosopher, he understood the need for advancement in individuals, communities, and nations by practical means. “It appears to be a truism today that anything touching upon US-Latin American policy is bound to end either in histrionics or hysteria, whether of the Left or Right. And former president of Guatemala, Juan Jose Arevalo’s The Shark and the Sardines is no exception. Free flowing, full of rhetoric at once both surly and suave, astream with shockers, statistics and stilettos, it promulgates what the blurbs dubb a “poetically tragic fable”, depicting in iridescent black and white the tortured heart beating south of our border, wherein Uncle Sam emerges as the Shark and the mestiza have-nots, the poor Sardines.”—KIRKUS Review

This biting commentary on the follies of humankind by a noted Mexican author cuts deeply yet leaves readers laughing—at themselves as well as at others. With his surgical intelligence, Juan José Arreola exposes the shams and hypocrisies, the false values and vices, the hidden diseases of society. Confabulario total, 1941–1961, of which this book is a translation, combines three earlier books—Varia invención (1949), Confabulario (1952), Punta de plata (1958)—and numerous later pieces. Although some of the pieces have a noticeably Mexican orientation, most of them transcend strictly regional themes to interpret the social scene in aspects common to all civilized cultures. Arreola’s view is not limited; much of his sophistication comes from his broad, deep, and varied knowledge of present and past, and from his almost casual use both of this knowledge and of his insight into its meaning for humanity. His familiarity with many little-known arts and sciences, numerous literatures, history, anthropology, and psychology, and his telling allusions to this rich lode of fact, increase the reader’s delight in his learned but witty, scalding but poetic, satire.

An odyssey of operatic proportions, featuring an obsession-fueled taxi driver After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor. Let No One Sleep is a delirious novel in which the mundane and extraordinary collide, art revives and devastates, and identity is unhinged by the treacherous forces of contemporary society.

This short, intense book exposes life inside the largest, most violent gang in the world, Mara Salvatrucha 13, more commonly known as MS-13. Right in the heart of El Salvador’s capital San Salvador, anthropologist Juan José Martínez d´Aubuisson observes firsthand an escalating cycle of brutality between MS-13 and its sworn enemies from Barrio 18 as it becomes a war fought on a professional scale with grenades and machine guns. For the better part of a year, d´Aubuisson was embedded in one of the cells of MS-13, where he learned its moral codes, rules, legends, and contradictions. His journey into the heart of the gang is guided by an enigmatic character, Destino, a veteran leader of MS-13. After many conversations with Destino, a strange kind of friendship emerges between the two, and the anthropologist understands not only the origin of the gang and its war with Barrio 18 but the deep-seated reasons for the regional violence. The book culminates in one of the most violent acts ever in an area that has seen more than its share: a full-scale attack on a public bus with thirty-two passengers on board. Fourteen people were killed and twenty-eight wounded. Almost all the principal characters in this book end up dying: some are killed in the war, while others fall to the state security forces. Those that do escape the war are imprisoned, exiled or murdered by their own gang. This is a true testimony of life inside a wild gang, in a neighborhood governed by abandoned boys. Juan José Martínez d´Aubuisson is a Salvadoran socio-cultural anthropologist committed to understanding violence in Central America. His uncle was one of Latin America’s most notoriously brutal military officers during the 1980s.

In Paris, Pichon Garay receives a computer disk containing a manuscript - which could be fictional or a memoir - by a nineteenth-century physician tasked with leading a group of five mental patients on a trip to a recently constructed asylum. Their trip, which ends in disaster, is a brilliant tragicomedy thanks to the various patients, including a delusional man who greatly over-estimates his own importance and a nymphomaniac nun. Fascinating as a faux historical novel, The Clouds is a metaphor for exile and an examination of madness.

Scars explores a crime committed by a 39-year-old labourer who shot his wife twice in the face with a shotgun by examining the circumstances of four characters who have some connection to the crime: A young reporter, Angel, who lives with his mother and works the courthouse beat; A dissolute attorney who clings to life only for his nightly baccarat; A misanthropic and dwindling judge who's creating a superfluous Dorian Gray translation; and her killer, Luis Fiore, who, on May Day, went duck hunting with his wife, daughter and a bottle of gin.