The country of the pointed firs

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translated [from the Spanish] by Langston Hughes

The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalized into a "poetess" of children and motherhood. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendor of her Hymns of America.

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Emma Raveling

Seventeen-year-old Kendra Irisavie is an ondine, a water elemental caught in the middle of an ancient war. The Aquidae are immortal dark demons who will stop at nothing to destroy the fragile balance of the Elemental world.

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Tomás Eloy Martínez

From one of Latin America's finest writers, a mesmerizing, blackly comic novel about the amazing real-life afterlife of the legendary Eva Peron. Suddenly struck down by cancer, she was given no hope to live. As thousands of the poor filled the park around her palace, chanting and praying for their "Saint Evita," she died. Some days before the end, she begged her husband that she not be forgotten. Grief-crazed (but politically crazy like a fox), he seized upon this idea quite literally. Sending for Europe's finest embalmer, he had the man waiting at her deathbed, and within minutes of her last breath, this Michelangelo of the mortuary was hard at work making her body physically immortal. Put on display on a pure glass slab suspended in a single beam of light from the ceiling of a darkened chamber, Evita entered everlasting life as the sacred object of national pilgrimage. Peron did less well: hated, rebelled against, and deposed, he had to flee. But his mere mortal - and equally ugly - successors realized to their acute discomfort that Evita's body was much more powerful than they were. Whoever controlled it controlled Argentina. And here begins Evita's fantastical true-life (if post-mortem) odyssey. Hidden away, stolen, replicated (three perfect copies of her body were made and used in a mad shell game by various factions), smuggled abroad, buried, dug up, and hijacked again, she traveled two continents exerting strange, unshakable power over everyone in her path.

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Gunter Grass

Based loosely on Grimm's The Fisherman and his Wife, this triumphant blend of folk tale and contemporary story takes place over the course of nine months, during which the wife of the narrator becomes pregnant and is regaled with tales of the various cooks the fisherman has met throughout his life. The emerging themes of the novel expose the periods when men made history and women's contributions went largely, in some cases gravely, unrecognized. Inventive, imaginitive and irreverent, this humorous, fundamentally brilliant novel highlights the value of modern-day myth and timeless legend.