Natasha Wimmer

An American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interact in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared.

Follows Amalfitano, exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter, as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It is here, in this border town, that Amalfitano meets Arcimboldi, a magician and writer whose work highlights the provisional and fragile nature of literature and life.

"It's 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to...

"Many authors have wrestled with the death of a father in their writing, but few have grappled with the subject as fiercely, or as powerfully, as the brilliant Spanish writer Marcos Giralt Torrente does in Father and Son, the mesmerizing and discomfiting memoir that won him Spain's highest literary award, the Spanish National Book Award. Giralt Torrente is best known for his fiction, but it is in this often savage memoir that he demonstrates the full...

"A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a young writer's fierce ambitions and intensely tender love of women. "Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime": so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Orphaned overnight as a teenager--"our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us"--she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, sees a terrible brightness...

"Set in Mexico in the 1970s, the novel charts the literary and romantic escapades of two Chilean aspiring writers, employing a range of genres, from epistolary novel to science fiction to satire"--

"Testifying to the squalor and grit of contemporary Cuba, Pedro Juan Gutierrez's novel in stories chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former journalist now living from hand to mouth, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Like the lives of many of his neighbors in the crumbling, once elegant apartment houses that line Havana's waterfront (and its notorious cruising strip, El Malecon), Pedro Juan's days and...

"Enrigue’s genius lies in his ability to bring readers close to its tangled knot of priests, mercenaries, warriors and princesses while adding a pinch of biting humor." —Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Los Angeles Times
“Riotously entertaining... A triumph of solemnity-busting erudition and mischievous invention that will delight and titillate.” —Financial Times
From the visionary author of Sudden...

"Splendid" —New York Times
"Mind-bending." —Wall Street Journal
"Brilliantly original. The best new novel I've read this year." —Salman Rushdie
A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the...