Our Books

A powerful account of the symbolic murder of the poet’s mother. From the first poem in this bilingual edition of The Men Who Killed My Mother, it is evident that the mother in “Our Mother” (“Nuestra Madre”) is not only Fernando Valverde’s. The soulful ref...Book Details

Rafael Alberti’s collection of poems set in vibrant Rome, his home in exile from Spain. After his long exile in France and Argentina following the Spanish Civil War, Rafael Alberti’s final home in exile was Rome, where he wrote Roma: Peligro para caminantes...Book Details

An English translation of Daniel Cordier’s epic portrait and memoir of the French Resistance during WWII. Daniel Cordier’s fascinating, intimate memoir is a major contribution to our understanding of the fraught and historic relations between General Charle...Book Details

A mother and son’s fictional journey to escape the Armenian Genocide and start anew.  Like any other fifteen-year-old boy, Aram might never have written the events of his still young life, except that he found himself suddenly plunged into exile, fleeing certain d...Book Details

The first major English translation of the final book in the expansive and essential “Celia” series by Elena Fortún. Set during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Celia in the Revolution is the last in a series of young adult novels written by Encarnación Arago...Book Details

A new translation of Federico García Lorca’s captivating lecture on duende. For years, Federico García Lorca’s lecture on duende has been a source of insight for writers and performers, including Ted Hughes, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, and Amanda Gorman. Duende:...Book Details

A lyrical novel following an idealistic student who explores the power of literature in Franco’s Spain. It’s the summer of 1963 and León Egea, a cocky nineteen-year-old student and aspiring author, has just finished his first year studying literature at the Univ...Book Details

A cherished erotic play by Federico García Lorca, illustrated by Fernando Zóbel, a major Spanish artist. Essays by Felipe Pereda, Luis Fernández Cifuentes, and Christopher Maurer With a Preface by Marta MateoPainting, poetry, and music come together in Zóbel...Book Details

A novel that tells the story of a Jewish family in World War II and reaches deep into Jewish history. Born in Brittany on the threshold of World War II, novelist Michèle Sarde had long been silent about her origins. After her mother, Jenny, finally shared their fami...Book Details

Translated by Karl Maurer Edited by Christopher Maurer New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli. This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly inj...Book Details

Set in early twentieth-century Spain, Hidden Path is a lyrical coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of a woman painter who struggles to find her way with art and with the women she loved. The novel is narrated in the first-person, following María Luisa as she ...Book Details

“To love is to act”— “Aimer, c’est agir.”  These words, which Victor Hugo wrote three days before he died, epitomize his life’s philosophy. His love of freedom, democracy, and all people—especially the poor and wretched—drove him not only to write his...Book Details

Emma Dante’s passionate and brutal plays stem from a need to confront important familial and societal realities in contemporary southern Italy. Her twenty-first century tales challenge stereotypes of the country and stage acts of resistance against the social, politic...Book Details

Victor Hugo spent years in political exile off the coast of Normandy. While there, he produced his masterpiece, Les Misérables—but that wasn’t all: he also wrote a book-length poem, La Fin de Satan, left unfinished and not published until after his death. Satan an...Book Details

Illustrated by Rolando Estévez Moving between the speech and silence of a woman struggling to speak freely, Ruth Behar embarks on a poetic voyage into her own vulnerability and the sacrifices of her exiled ancestors as she tries to understand love, loss, reg...Book Details

Elegant prose and imaginative ironies bring these compelling short stories to life in this first English-language collection from Mexican author Roberto Ransom. Each of the ten stories is filled with fascinating, yet enigmatic and sometimes elusive characters: an alliga...Book Details

With an afterword by Michal Held. “I only wanted to write about them, / Narrate their fierce audacity, / Their voyages through the channels of the Mediterranean.” So begins a poetic journey through the islands of the Mediterranean that served as homes and refuge ...Book Details

In Lost Cities Go to Paradise, poetry breaks into song and poetic prose becomes lively storytelling as Alicia Borinsky raises intimate questions about the fragility of contemporary life. Composed of many layered scenes, unforgettable characters, snapshots, and vignettes...Book Details

Peruvian poet Luis Hernández is legendary in his native country. Haunted by addiction and spending periodic reclusion in rehabilitation centers, Hernández was exceptionally gifted in his youth, publishing three books of poetry by the time he was twenty-four. He did no...Book Details

A splash of sea foam. A sly sparrow. A man dodging the rain. From such mundane, unexpected moments, Spanish poet Claudio Rodríguez crafted his 1965 Alliance and Condemnation, a collection of poems that temper the joy of existence—the “bounty that turns my flawed br...Book Details

While living in exile with his family on the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, Victor Hugo wrote some of his greatest poetry and prose, including Les Misérables and two epic poems: Dieu and La Fin de Satan. Dieu pictures the imaginary search for God by a namel...Book Details

Few have written more memorably about the work of poetry and the poetics of work than Juan Ramón Jiménez, winner of a Nobel Prize and discerning teacher of an entire generation of Spanish poets. In this series of aphorisms, Jiménez brings together the elements of per...Book Details

"He was named Jorge, like me, and for this his life hurts me twice." So writes Jorge Volpi in this highly original novel that presents a biographical perspective on the tragic life of the poet and chemist Jorge Cuesta. Cuesta was one of the founders of Los Contemporáne...Book Details

In these intimate pages, award-winning Catalan poet Joan Margarit offers a passionate defense of poetry and of the intelligible poem—the well-made text that can provide refuge, wisdom, and consolation. Inspired by Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet, this slende...Book Details

Marjorie Agosín’s intensely personal long poem The Light of Desire is both a secular and sacred meditation on love and its meanings in the land of Israel. Following the tradition of the Song of Songs and the secular poetry of Sepharad, the beloved in The Light ...Book Details

With this highly original collection of short stories, Catalonian writer Jaume Cabré takes his place among the masters of the form. In Winter Journey, the reader encounters disparate and often desperate characters—pianist, cuckold, whore, organ builder, rabbi, priest...Book Details

Tango and fairy tales mix freely in this seductive, irreverent, and sensual collection of poems. From a city that is at once Buenos Aires and all others, Alicia Borinsky brings to life reluctant mothers, slightly mad teachers, selfless wives, neighborhood witches, best ...Book Details

Appearing for the first time outside of Cuba, this bold collection of short stories provides an intimate and critical view of Afro-Cuba. Inés María Martiatu’s stories—presented in a unique "split" English/Spanish edition—span postcolonial Cuba of the early twent...Book Details

Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900–83), known for his surrealist themes and unflinching social criticism, was an artist defined by intellectual ambition and controversy. An exile who produced some of his most famous work in Mexico and France during Franco’s dict...Book Details

Set during the last years of Spanish rule in Equatorial Guinea, Shadows of Your Black Memory presents the voice of a young African man reflecting on his childhood. Through the idealistic eyes of the nameless protagonist, Donato Ndongo portrays the cultural conflicts bet...Book Details

In her fourth book of poems, Mexican-born Olivia Maciel lyrically evokes another America. She writes with the critical and contemplative eye of a poet, revealing mystery and beauty in places dark and light, near and far. The richly allusive language of Sombra en plata /...Book Details

’Con las debidas licencias’ is the Spanish version of ’imprimatur’ or ’nihil obstat,’ the Latin used for books published under Catholic censorship. In Spanish, the title plays with the semiotic richness of the word ’license,’ meaning ’liberty of acti...Book Details

Born in the south of Chile, but living and writing in the U.S. for the past thirty years, Raúl Barrientos eludes the easy categories: Latin American, Latino, American. All of these, and more. Yet always a poet, turning whatever he touches into startling imagery and gri...Book Details

Accomplished businessman Richard J. Franke offers in Cut from Whole Cloth an intimate account of the American immigrant experience, recounting the moving story of his grandparents’ struggle to build a new life in turn-of-the-century America.  Franke draws on extensiv...Book Details

For Eduardo Urios-Aparisi poetry is above all, word, spoken word. Word that commits, pronounces, sounds. Word that leaves knots in the voice. For Urios, words play and challenge to play, to conceive the world from different and unsuspected points of view. The poems refl...Book Details

In Limestone Moon Olivia Maciel interrogates the inexpressible. Metaphor reaches into a realm of light and darkness to mysteriously converse with the silence enveloping the word. The tinging of this dark light which transcends borders, reveals a vehement and genuine int...Book Details

“Let us agree,” Federico García Lorca wrote, “that one of man’s most beautiful postures is that of St. Sebastian.” “In my ‘Saint Sebastian’ I remember you,” Salvador Dali replied to García Lorca, referring to the essay on aesthetics that Dalí had...Book Details

“In Malambo . . . the Rimac proudly rubs elbows with the freedmen, the cimarrons, and smuggled slaves. . . It runs united to the other subterranean springs underneath Blanket Street, Weavers Lane, and under Jewish Street . . . and Swordmaker’s Lanes.” The Rimac...Book Details

“One day you’re going to ask me, ‘Mama, do you remember that trip to Salto?’ and I don’t want such questions to go unanswered.” What happens on that trip to Salto opens this moving narrative by Uruguayan writer and poet Circe Maia. It begins with a mother...Book Details

In Olivia Maciel’s Filigree of Light, one enters a lyric of solitude and light, water and wind. Maciel is a poet who has the power to reveal and surprise, bringing one close to things. She approaches the unknown, searching with riddles and reverie....Book Details