Closer than she thinks

Sample

Juan García Ponce

Like waves ebbing and flowing, love surges and subsides among four friends who share a vacation at the house on the beach. As they navigate the seas of love and friendship, jealousy and unfaithfulness, Elena, Marta, Eduardo, and Rafael are swept up in the opposing currents that flow between security and personal freedom, marriage and sexual liberation, family and work, provincial and city life, and traditional and unconventional gender roles. This deceptively simple novel, published in Mexico in 1966 as La casa en la playa and here translated into English for the first time, is an important work by one of Mexico's, and indeed Latin America's, major writers of the twentieth century. Juan Garc̕a Ponce helped Mexican arts and letters break out of the ossified styles and themes of the post-Revolutionary "Mexican School" with works that explore the conflict between individual desire and the demands of family and work. Written at a turning point in his career, The House on the Beach foreshadows his embrace of the erotic encounter as a means of undermining rigid, socially constructed personal identity. It supports feminist views and probes deeply into the contradictions, backwardness, and progress of modern Mexican society. --Publisher description.

Sample

Thomas Berger

The time is the 1930s. Buddy Sandifer, dressed in his natty white flannels, baby-blue shirt, striped tie, tan-and-white shoes, and coconut-straw hat with polka-dot band, is falling into one of his moods. Owner of a used-car lot and father of a fifteen-year-old son with a penchant for sex manuals, Buddy has decided to murder his wife and marry his mistress, Laverne, a robust blonde who cooks his favorite meal of fried pork chops, fried potatoes, and fried apples while wearing a short pink apron over black-lace step-ins and brassiere, long-gartered silk stockings, and platform shoes. The only problem is how to arrange the crime.

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Cao Xuegin

Ben shu shi wo guo si da gu dian ming zhu zhi yi, yi jia bao yu, lin dai yu, xue bao chai de ai qing jiu ge wei xian suo, yi jia, shi, wang, xue si da jia zu wei zhong xin, yi qing chao feng jian she hui wei bei jing, xie chu le feng jian da jia zu de xing shuai, tong shi ye zhe she chu wo guo feng jian she hui xing shuai de li shi.

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Pedro Juan Gutiérrez

Pedru Juan paints in his crumbling Havana apartment, beset by a growing sense of melancholy as he observes the lives of the hustlers, hipsters, and hookers in the city below. He is pursued by Gloria, a proud and sophisticated prostitute, bent on curbing his wandering instincts.