A Rainmaker Translation Grant Winner from the Black Mountain Institute: Senselessness, acclaimed Salvadoran author Horacio Castallanos Moya's astounding debut in English, explores horror with hilarity and electrifying panache. 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. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger—after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

This book represents a culmination of research, thought, and clinical experience collected over the past 15 years. It was written to help those individuals who find themselves in the quandry of not demonstrating symptoms of sufficient intensity and/or severity to be recognized as obsessive and compuslive and yet they are. Such mild-moderate symptoms (Obsessive Compulsive Symptoms; OCS rather than OCD) are nevfertheless life interfering, distressing, anxiety and panic provoking, have secondary and tertiary symptoms causally linked to them such as depression, explosiveness, emotional instability and yet are very treatable. This book is for us all. May the information therein help you as it has been helping others well before the actual book was completed. Ron D. Kingsley

A groundbreaking analysis of two movements of the historical avant-garde

Welcome to the social and environmental devastation that is Britain in 1996. Welcome to interchangeable political parties and their chattering media jesters pulling together to make Johnny Rotten's dream come true: no future. But despite their best efforts, fear, cynicism and the National Lottery aren't the whole story. Protest hasn't disappeared during the last twenty years, and nor have solidarity and imagination. They have simply taken new forms; they have moved out and moved on. More and more people, young people especially, are making a virtue of necessity and living outside Britain's rotting institutional fabric. Travellers, tribes, ravers or squatters, direct-action protesters of every kind, DIYers. This book is the first attempt to write their history, to explore and celebrate their endlessly creative senselessness. George McKay looks back at the hippies of the sixties and punks of the seventies, and shows hot their legacies have been transformed into what he calls cultures of resistance. His journey through the undergrounds of the last two decades takes us from the Windsor Free Festival of 1972 to the Castlemorton Free Rave Megaparty exactly twenty years later, from the anarchopunk band Crass via Teepee Valley and Glastonbury to today's ever-intensifying anti-road protests, and to the widespread opposition to the Criminal Justice Act. Drawing on fanzines and free papers, record lyrics, interviews and diaries, Senseless Acts of Beauty gives a vivid, insider account of countercultures, networks and movements that until now have remained largely unrecorded. At the same time, George McKay analyses their effects, and gives his own answers to the questions they pose: what are their politics, their aspirations, their consequences? One thing is certain, he argues: if there is resistance anywhere in Britain today, then it is here, in the beat-up buses, beleaguered squats and tree-top barricades, that we should start to look for it.

Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part robot and part human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of the erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.

Salvadorean society is shocked by the gruesome murder of a young upper-class woman, and no one more so than her best friend Laura. In her first-person solo narration, Laura rattles on and on about her disbelief and horror at the evils all around her—but who’s that in the mirror? Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator—female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable—paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse. Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness was acclaimed “an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art” (Village Voice) and “a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials” (Russell Banks).

Providing a clear and thoughtful discussion of human suffering, Ian Wilkinson explores some of the ways in which research into social suffering might lead us to reinterpret the meaning of modern history as well as revise our outlook upon the possible futures that await us.

With pitch-perfect, pitch-black humor, this saga refracts through one family's struggles a whole country's nightmare. The tyrant of the book is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, known as the Warlock, who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April of 1944 failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. The book takes place during that tumultuous month between the coup and the strike. With her husband a political prisoner and her son fleeing for his life, wealthy Haydée Aragon takes matters into her own hands. Events ricochet from one near-disaster to the next.--Publisher's description.

A high-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home to El Salvador. High-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home at the tail end of El Salvador's long civil war. Is the plan a dream or a nightmare? Is he courageous, foolhardy, or just plain dumb? Is the bubbling brew of horrors and threats actual or imagined? After he seeks relief for liver pain through hypnosis (while drinking more than ever, despite the treatments), his few impulse-control mechanisms rapidly dissolve, and reality only rarely intrudes on his cogitations. Harebrained murder plots, half-mad arguments, hysterical rants: the narrative escalates at a maniacal pace, infused with Horacio Castellanos Moya's uniquely outlandish and acerbic sense of humor.

The events of 1999’s Columbine shooting preoccupy Forsythe in these poems, refracting her vision to encompass killer, victim, and herself as a girl, suddenly aware of the precarity of her own life and the porousness of her body to others’ gaze, demands, violence. Deeply researched and even more deeply felt, Perennial inhabits landscapes of emerging adulthood and explosive cruelty—the hills of Pittsburgh and the sere grass of Colorado; the spines of books in a high school library that has become a killing ground; the tenderness of children as they grow up and grow hard, becoming acquainted with dread, grief, and loss.