Men of Maize

Men of Maize
Author: Miguel Ángel Asturias
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2024-09-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593512456

A novel whose time has come: the Nobel Prize–winning author of Mr. President’s visionary epic of ecological devastation, capitalist exploitation, and Indigenous wisdom, now available again for its 75th anniversary with a new introduction and with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar A Penguin Classic Deep in the mountain forests of Guatemala, a community of Indigenous Mayans—the "men of maize"—serves as stewards to sacred corn crops. When profiteering outsiders encroach on their territory and threaten to abuse the fertile land, they enter a bloody struggle to protect their way of life. Blurring the lines between history and mythology, Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias's lush, dream-like work offers a prescient warning against the loss of ancestral wisdom and the environmental destruction set in motion by colonial oppression and capitalist greed. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The President

The President
Author: Miguel Asturias
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2019-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1474614620

The President tells the story of a ruthless dictator and his schemes to dispose of a political adversary in an unnamed country usually identified as Guatemala. Drawing on his experience as a journalist writing under repressive conditions, Miguel Angel Asturias provides a blazing indictment of totalitarian government and its damaging psychological effects on society - from the harvest of terror to cowardice, to sycophancy, to treachery and intrigue, and the total sacrifice of human values to lust for power. Written in a language of freedom and originality, full of extraordinary symbolism, biting satire, poetry and dream sequences, with an imagination that is both lyrical and ferocious, The President is a surrealist masterpiece and one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

Strong Wind

Strong Wind
Author: Miguel Angel Asturias
Publisher:
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1975
Genre:
ISBN:

The Green Pope

The Green Pope
Author: Miguel Angel Asturias
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Total Pages: 416
Release: 1971
Genre: Avarice
ISBN:

The author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, tells the story of an ugly American, George Maker Thompson. Thompson was a pirate in the Caribbean but feels that he's wasted his time as a pirate on the sea and that making money on the water will not lead to the riches that he wants to accumulate. It’s not a particularly secret wisdom that those who have wealth are likely to have power too. After all, it’s money that makes the world go round... at least a materialistic world like ours. Little wonder that our society produces considerable numbers of men and women whose primary goal in life is to gain money and ever more money. In The Green Pope by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Guatemalan winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1967 “for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin-America”, a young American who cares for nothing but wealth and power starts a banana plantation in Guatemala mercilessly ruining, driving out or even killing small local farmers and opponents on his rise. Neither the suicide of his fiancé, the death of his wife in childbirth or the pregnancy of his unmarried daughter make him reconsider his priorities.

The Eyes of the Interred

The Eyes of the Interred
Author: Miguel Angel Asturias
Publisher:
Total Pages: 712
Release: 1973
Genre: Central America
ISBN:

Describes life in the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and is the outcome of the plot started in Banana Republic trilogy.

Legends of Guatemala

Legends of Guatemala
Author: Miguel Angel Asturias
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Guatemalan drama
ISBN: 9781891270536

Legends and plays from Guatemala. It was a groundbreaking achievement of ethnographic surrealism, a liberating avant-garde recreation of popular tales and characters from the Guatemalan collective unconscious.

The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape

The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape
Author: Library of Congress. Latin American, Portuguese, and Spanish Division
Publisher: U.S. Government Printing Office
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1974
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Ever since 1945, when Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Hispanic Foundation in the Library of Congress had been looking forward to an opportunity to record her voice for posterity. She graciously accepted the invitation, despite her policy of not reading her poetry in public. The Library's recording of the Chilean poet is the only one extant. The materials accumulated since 1943 were acknowledged to be unique and of the highest quality. In 1958 the Library evolved a program for a well-integrated collection of noteworthy Hispanic literature--either verse or prose--on tape. With the aid of a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, a pilot project was undertaken in the same year, September to December inclusive. The salient feature of the project was that the Library commissioned the curator of the Archive, Francisco Aguilera, to visit Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay and obtain recordings on magnetic tape expressly for the Library of Congress. During September and November 1960, Panama, Guatemala, and Mexico were visited, and in April-June 1961 collecting continued in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.

I, Rigoberta Menchú

I, Rigoberta Menchú
Author: Rigoberta Menchú
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1984
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780860917885

Her story reflects the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America today. Rigoberta suffered gross injustice and hardship in her early life: her brother, father and mother were murdered by the Guatemalan military. She learned Spanish and turned to catechist work as an expression of political revolt as well as religious commitment. The anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, herself a Latin American woman, conducted a series of interviews with Rigoberta Menchu. The result is a book unique in contemporary literature which records the detail of everyday Indian life. Rigoberta’s gift for striking expression vividly conveys both the religious and superstitious beliefs of her community and her personal response to feminist and socialist ideas. Above all, these pages are illuminated by the enduring courage and passionate sense of justice of an extraordinary woman.

The Betrothed

The Betrothed
Author: Alessandro Manzoni
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 705
Release: 2024-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0812978811

Italy’s greatest novel and a masterpiece of world literature, The Betrothed chronicles the unforgettable romance of Renzo and Lucia, who endure tyranny, war, famine, and plague to be together. Published in 1827 but set two centuries earlier, against the tumultuous backdrop of seventeenth-century Lombardy during the Thirty Years’ War, The Betrothed is the story of two peasant lovers who want nothing more than to marry. Their region of northern Italy is under Spanish occupation, and when the vicious Spaniard Don Rodrigo blocks their union in an attempt to take Lucia for himself, the couple must struggle to persevere against his plots—which include false charges against Renzo and the kidnapping of Lucia by a robber baron called the Unnamed—while beset by the hazards of war, bread riots, and a terrifying outbreak of bubonic plague. First and foremost a love story, the novel also weaves issues of faith, justice, power, and truth into a sweeping epic in the tradition of Ivanhoe, Les Misérables, and War and Peace. Groundbreakingly populist in its day and hugely influential to succeeding generations, Alessandro Manzoni’s masterwork has long been considered one of Italy’s national treasures. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun