The Obscene Bird of Night

The Obscene Bird of Night
Author: José Donoso
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2003
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781567920468

This haunting jungle of a novel has been hailed as "a masterpiece" by Luis Bunuel and "one of the great novels not only of Spanish America, but of our time" by Carlos Fuentes. The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions, The Obscene Bird of Night is a triumph of imaginative, visionary writing. Its luxuriance, fecundity, horror, and energy will not soon fade from the reader's mind -- Back cover

Curfew

Curfew
Author: Jose Donoso
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2024-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040279309

Jose Donoso has created a hauntingly beautiful novel of contemporary Chile and the human condition. Curfew takes place during a twenty-four-hour period in January 1985. Matilde Neruda, widow of the Nobel Prize-winning poet, has just passed away and Chile's various factions rally to turn the event to their advantage. For Pinochet's junta it represents a chance to assert political authority; for the intellectuals who had basked in Neruda's light, it is an opportunity to grab the spoils of the estate.

Understanding José Donoso

Understanding José Donoso
Author: Sharon Magnarelli
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780872498440

Chilean writer José Donoso is one of a handful of authors inevitably mentioned in relationship to the 'boom' in Spanish American literature during the 1960s and 1970s. His name is frequently linked with those of other Latin writers such as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Rulfo, and Cortázar. Like his contemporaries, Donoso blends the physical and the psychological in his fiction. The perceptions of his characters are constantly changing. For Donoso, 'reality' is a state of mind always subject to the imagination, and nothing is stable.

The Garden Next Door

The Garden Next Door
Author: José Donoso
Publisher:
Total Pages: 243
Release: 1994-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780802133687

A Chilean writer named Julio and his wife, Gloria, are at a low point in their lives. Constantly bickering, the pair are beset by worries about money, their writing, and their son (who may or may not be plying the oldest profession in Marrakesh). When Julio's boyhood best friend, now a famous artist, lends the couple his luxurious Madrid apartment for the summer, it is an escape for both - but in particular for Julio, who fantasizes about the garden next door and the erotic life of the lovely young aristocratic woman who inhabits it. But Julio's life - and career - unravel In Madrid: he is rebuffed by a famous literary agent, Nuria Monclus, who detests him and his novel; his son's friend from Marrakesh moves in and causes havoc; and Gloria begins to drink. In the face of pitiless adversity, Julio's talent inexorably begins to fade. The garden next door, however, is also Gloria, who has been doing some creating of her own. It is this twist that transforms Donoso's brilliant satire of the writer's life into something even greater: a carefully crafted and bitteily comic meditation on gardens, deceit, and the nature of a writer's muse.

Where the Bird Sings Best

Where the Bird Sings Best
Author: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Publisher: Restless Books
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2014-09-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1632060078

The magnum opus from Alejandro Jodorowsky—director of The Holy Mountain, star of Jodorowsky’s Dune, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, innovator behind classic comics The Incal and Metabarons, and legend of Latin American literature. There has never been an artist like the polymathic Chilean director, author, and mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky. For eight decades, he has blazed new trails across a dazzling variety of creative fields. While his psychedelic, visionary films have been celebrated by the likes of John Lennon, Marina Abramovic, and Kanye West, his novels—praised throughout Latin America in the same breath as those of Gabriel García Márquez—have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Until now. Where the Bird Sings Best tells the fantastic story of the Jodorowskys’ emigration from Ukraine to Chile amidst the political and cultural upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jodorowsky’s book transforms family history into heroic legend: incestuous beekeepers hide their crime with a living cloak of bees, a czar fakes his own death to live as a hermit amongst the animals, a devout grandfather confides only in the ghost of a wise rabbi, a transgender ballerina with a voracious sexual appetite holds a would-be saint in thrall. Kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, and erotic, Where the Bird Sings Best expands the classic immigration story to mythic proportions. Praise “This epic family saga, reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in structure and breadth, reads at a breakneck pace. Though ostensibly a novelization of the author's own family history, it is a raucous carnival of the surreal, mystical, and grotesque.” —Publishers Weekly "A man whose life has been defined by cosmic ambitions." —The New York Times Magazine "A great eccentric original....A legendary man of many trades.” —Roger Ebert For more information on Alejandro Jodorowsky, please visit www.restlessbooks.com/alejandro-jodorowsky

José Donoso's House of Fiction

José Donoso's House of Fiction
Author: Flora María González Mandri
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814325261

"This volume examines the multiple narrative perspectives Donoso presents and traces a transformation in Donoso's works from complex stage performance to political forum. Studying fiction as grotesque, mannered theater or as a transparent screen through which social and political concerns are scrutinized, Gonzalez Mandri illuminates another constant in Donoso's work: a weaving of feminine and masculine aspects of artistic voice as they incorporate the idioms of drama, radio, film, and television."--BOOK JACKET.

Not One Day

Not One Day
Author: Anne Garréta
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1646052315

Winner of the 2018 Albertine Prize Finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards Finalist for the 2018 French American Foundation Translation Prize Available in a new edition, Anne Garréta's sensual portrayal of trysts past. A tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing, Not One Day is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta's intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, love, and desire. Garréta, author of the acclaimed genderless love story Sphinx and experimental novel In Concrete, vows to write every day about a woman from her past. With exquisite elegance, she revisits bygone loves and lusts, capturing memories of her past relationships in a captivating, erotic composition of momentary interactions and lasting impressions, of longing and of loss.

Terra Nostra

Terra Nostra
Author: Carlos Fuentes
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 1183
Release: 2013-05-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466840153

Terra Nostra is one of the great masterpieces of modern Latin American fiction. Concerned with nothing less than the history of Spain and of South America, with the Indian Gods and with Christianity, with the birth, the passion, and the death of civilizations, Fuentes's great novel is, indeed, that rare creation--the total work of art. Magnificently translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, Terra Nostra is, as Milan Kundera says in his afterword, "the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say."

Christopher Unborn

Christopher Unborn
Author: Carlos Fuentes
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2013-05-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466840099

This inspired novel, Christopher Unborn, is narrated by the as yet unborn first child to be born on October 12, 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America; his conception and birth bracket the novel. A playfully savage masterpiece by Carlos Fuentes.