Doña María's Story

Doña María's Story
Author: Daniel James
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780822324928

One woman's testimonial about the Peron years sheds light on gender hierarchies, the role of women in industry, women as union militants, and the material culture of working class family life in Argentina.

Of Love and Other Demons

Of Love and Other Demons
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 110191114X

AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN eBOOK! On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria – the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport – is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love – and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Author: B. Traven
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1967
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780809001606

Two hard-luck drifters and a grizzled prospector seek gold in the mountains in Mexico. They start off as friends, but after they discover the lode the greed and paranoia set in.

When I Was Mortal

When I Was Mortal
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2013-01-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141973625

In the dark narratives that make up When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías, winner of the Dublin IMPAC prize and author of the bestselling A Heart So White, a dapper Paris doctor dispenses a treatment for dissatisfied wives. A mother auditions for her first porn movie. A writer working on a study of pain makes himself the subject of his experiments. A voyeur mistakes a murderer for a fellow peeping tom ... these are some of the characters observed by the narrator of these chilling stories. Ironic, unsettling, imbued with dread and with droll humour, Javier Marías' short tales cast a shrewd, sardonic eye on humanity. Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

...y no se lo trago la tierra / ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him

...y no se lo trago la tierra / ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him
Author: Tomàs Rivera
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2015-09-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781611923391

ñI tell you, God could care less about the poor. Tell me, why must we live here like this? What have we done to deserve this? YouÍre so good and yet you suffer so much,î a young boy tells his mother in Tomàs RiveraÍs classic novel about the migrant worker experience. Outside the chicken coop that is their home, his father wails in pain from the unbearable cramps brought on by sunstroke after working in the hot fields. The young boy canÍt understand his parentsÍ faith in a god that would impose such horrible suffering, poverty and injustice on innocent people. Adapted into the award-winning film ƒand the earth did not swallow him and recipient of the first award for Chicano literature, the Premio Quinto Sol, in 1970, RiveraÍs masterpiece recounts the experiences of a Mexican-American community through the eyes of a young boy. Forced to leave their home in search of work, the migrants are exploited by farmers, shopkeepers, even other Mexican Americans, and the boy must forge his identity in the face of exploitation, death and disease, constant moving and conflicts with school officials. In this new edition of a powerful novel comprised of short vignettes, Rivera writes hauntingly about alienation, love and betrayal, man and nature, death and resurrection and the search for community.

A Manuscript of Ashes

A Manuscript of Ashes
Author: Antonio Muñoz Molina
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2008-08-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547541910

In this “beautifully wrought” novel set in Franco-era Spain, a university student stumbles into a decades-old mystery (New York magazine). It’s the late sixties, the last dark years of Franco’s dictatorship. Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuel’s country estate in the small town of Mágina to write his thesis on an old friend of his uncle, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana. The country house is full of traces of the poet—notes, photographs, journals—and Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Inés, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solana’s lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime. One of Spain’s most celebrated literary figures, the author of Sepharad and In the Night of Time weaves a “rapturously gothic” tale that is both a novel of ideas and an intricately plotted mystery (The New York Sun). “A brilliant novel by an important writer unafraid of ideas, emotions and genuine beauty.” —Los Angeles Times “Already a contemporary classic, this work . . . is an enigmatic gem in the very best metafiction tradition.” —Library Journal

Negotiating Love in Post-revolutionary Nicaragua

Negotiating Love in Post-revolutionary Nicaragua
Author: Turid Hagene
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2008
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9783039110117

This book explores the issue of love and its place in the reproduction of gender asymmetry in Nicaragua. The theme is discussed in the context of specific religious and work practices, living arrangements, gender values and norms, and the gender practices and legislation of the Sandinista revolution. The study uses lifeworld phenomenology as its theoretical approach, placing people's own experience center stage. Therefore, a case study of the Esperanza sewing cooperative is presented, built on life stories, interview materials and participant observation with the cooperative women and their husbands. The material and discursive practices and emotional experiences of men and women are examined in this particular socio-cultural setting. How do we account for the highly unequal bargains the women strike with their husbands, accepting large material responsibilities and «time-share» love even if they experience this as emotionally hurtful? The study testifies to women's autonomy in family maintenance and religious practices, an autonomy which seems to falter in the fields of love and sexuality; some of the men and women, however, negotiate subtle changes in gender norms and values.

The Oral History Reader

The Oral History Reader
Author: Robert Perks
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 743
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317371321

The Oral History Reader, now in its third edition, is a comprehensive, international anthology combining major, ‘classic’ articles with cutting-edge pieces on the theory, method and use of oral history. Twenty-seven new chapters introduce the most significant developments in oral history in the last decade to bring this invaluable text up to date, with new pieces on emotions and the senses, on crisis oral history, current thinking around traumatic memory, the impact of digital mobile technologies, and how oral history is being used in public contexts, with more international examples to draw in work from North and South America, Britain and Europe, Australasia, Asia and Africa. Arranged in five thematic sections, each with an introduction by the editors to contextualise the selection and review relevant literature, articles in this collection draw upon diverse oral history experiences to examine issues including: Key debates in the development of oral history over the past seventy years First hand reflections on interview practice, and issues posed by the interview relationship The nature of memory and its significance in oral history The practical and ethical issues surrounding the interpretation, presentation and public use of oral testimonies how oral history projects contribute to the study of the past and involve the wider community. The challenges and contributions of oral history projects committed to advocacy and empowerment With a revised and updated bibliography and useful contacts list, as well as a dedicated online resources page, this third edition of The Oral History Reader is the perfect tool for those encountering oral history for the first time, as well as for seasoned practitioners.

The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits
Author: Isabel Allende
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2005-04-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1400043182

Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s classic novel is both a richly symbolic family saga and the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country’s turbulent history. In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende brings to life a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring than the political allegiances that set them at odds. The House of the Spirits not only brings another nation’s history thrillingly to life, but also makes its people’s joys and anguishes wholly our own.

Dona Tules

Dona Tules
Author: Mary J. Straw Cook
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-03-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0826343147

Cook takes a new look at this notorious woman of 1840s Santa Fe.