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New Portuguese Letters is one of the great works of modern women's literature. This erotic, lyrical and profound novel of women's experience is the product of a creative alliance among three writers, all feminists, all named Maria, all mothers, all educated by nuns. The Three Marias take as their inspiration the seventeenth-century European classic Letters of a Portuguese Nun, five passionate missives supposedly written by Sister Mariana Alcoforado to the soldier-lover who had deserted her. These modern Marias weave tales, poems and meditations around the myths and reality of contemporary women's lives, a text that still engages readers today. When it first appeared, the book was banned, and the authors were arrested and charged with obscenity and abuse of freedom of the press. Today New Portuguese Letters remains as fresh and challenging as when the cause of the Three Marias first lit a flame of international protest by women and for women.

In Winter Quarters two performers past their prime have come to the provincial town of Colonia Vela, the setting of A Funny Dirty Little War, to open a local festival. Strangers to each other, this worn-out boxer and has-been tango singer become loyal friends -- even unto death. The boxer has been selected to fight the local hero, the army's champ who has national ambitions. It soon becomes clear that the town vigilantes and military toughs don't mean for any trophies -- or the mayor's daughter -- to go to these "losers". As the underdogs try to go the distance, Soriano's gritty, Chandleresque prose builds a harrowing picture of a society in the grip of a bizarre and terrifying struggle.

"You don't know us," the writer said. "We're different here in Chile." Ariel Dorfman's early novel Hard Rain was written in the last chaotic months before the Pinochet bloodbath ended Allende's elected government. The publication of this book to acclaim outside Chile enabled the author to escape into exile. Here is all the drama and tension of those last months and days, vividly delivered through the eyes and experience of one of Latin America's greatest writers. The tragedy of fifty years ago now comes alive again, in George Shivers' expert English translation."That was Chile: all these individual wills, thoughts, journeys, betrayals, acts of generosity, acts of faith, obscenities, evasions;...you'd have to freeze time and bring every life to a halt so that no one would forget what had happened at that precise moment..." - from Hard Rain¿

"This fierce little novel tells the story of a political con­frontation in a remote village in Argentina. Obscure differences between Peronist supporters and leaders escalate in a crescendo of violence to the final massacre. The characters, who with each event evolve from the comic and grotesque to the tragic, are observed by the author with a cool, dispassionate gaze, though in end we are left with a feeling of bitter pity. This is because, in spite of all their moral and mental wretchedness, in spite of the emptiness of their ambitions and fanaticism, they themselves are poor victims."Italo CalvinoA Funny Dirty Little War marries the Keystone Kops and Kafka.

Vladimir Makanin, was the great Russian chronicler of post-Soviet society, the new Russia that is seeking to expand and bringing new terror to the world today. With taut psychological depth, wry humor, caricature, and surreal fantasy, Makanin explores the roots of that society, including inside his own head.The hero of Baize-Covered Table undergoes a searching bureaucratic 'investigation', that staple of the old Soviet and even older Russian police state. With the naked intensity of personal nightmare, the hero anticipates and returns to the starting scene of his inquisition: the bare room, the Table, the ever-present Decanter, and behind the table those recurring phantoms, 'The former Party Man,' "The Young Wolf,' 'The Almost Pretty Woman,' 'The One Who Asks the Questions.' "It's the Table that gives power to the people behind it," says Makanin. "Take it away and they're just ordinary folk, you and me, your best friends maybe. I've lived with these phantoms from childhood. Any Russian -- it's an old Russian nightmare we're dealing with, not just a Soviet one -- would recognize the situation. Having them rummage in your insides, being helpless, belittled. You needn't have done anything to realize your helplessness, your guilt."Vladimir Makanin welcomed perestroika, but shows in Baize-Covered Table that Homo Sovieticus never really went away. His writings on the Chechen War expose the pointless cruelty, violence and corruption of Russian soldiers like his anti-hero Asan (a Chechen honorific recalling Alexander the Great). Makanin extends the themes of Gogol and Dostoevsky and finds the downtrodden and the guilty to be the most interesting characters for a writer. His exploration of the post-Soviet culture of denunciation and interrogation recalls Kafka's The Trial.

Lu Wenfu, like the wonton-sellers, rickshaw pullers, and petty bureaucrats in these stories, was buffeted by four decades of changes in Chinese politics and society since the 1949 Revolution. Denounced as a writer and demoted in 1957, in 1965, and again in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution, he returned to writing in 1978 after two decades of enforced silence. Still, his voice remains one of the most attractive and sympathetic among China's major writers - understanding, not spiteful, capable of humour and gentle irony. His outstanding novella The Gourmet and the other stories in this, his only fully-curated collection in English, reveal the China that opened to the world after Mao's death. Here the tensions of a society emerging from years of upheaval are drawn with the relaxed, lyrical line of a master painter.

Hadi Khorsandi is Iran's best-known comic writer. His humorous essays and flawless parodies of officialdom skewer the mullahs governing Iran today, just as he skewered the Shah's people before the 1979 revolution. He now lives in exile in England.This is the only book where English-language readers can enjoy the wit that Iranian readers have appreciated for years. This collection of Khorsandi's writing highlights a genial and inventive spirit that will be instantly attractive to readers everywhere. Happily, his children carry on the family tradition in Britain: his son in journalism and his daughter as a top-ranking comedienne on TV, radio and in standup, mixing irreverent laughter with a sharp political edge.

The great Romanian writer's tenth novel - his only work in English - is a Proustian feast of memory and experience centering on young Paul and his family, who live through World War II in circumstances sadly familiar today, where a remote village is swept up in fighting between rival armies, one of them ... Russian. The boy's father, a fiercely idealistic teacher but a bungling family man, is deported to Siberia, leaving Mother to take charge of the school, bury the dead of all sides, and try to protect her "e;little orphan"e; from the horrors of life as well as from its delightfully childish erotic adventures. Fast forward to the postwar debates between the grownup son and his father, in Angela Clark's superb, flowing translation: The teacher in Father... "e;As opposed to the other conquerors and occupying forces, the Russian has a great big heart, as big as a cartwheel. A Russian isn't Russian unless, before he sticks the knife in your back, he kisses you on the cheek, explains to you why he, poor soul, has been forced, cursed and condemned to do it... and there you go, in the twinkling of an eye. But you can be sure he will be the one to suffer the torments of hell. God chose him for this kind of work: to help you, to liberate you, to teach you, to give you the shirt off his back today, because that shirt was yours anyway, yesterday..."e; "e;I think you're exaggerating,"e; I said. "e;Listen, I hope from the very bottom of my heart that I am exaggerating..."e;from My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest

In this extraordinary, prizewinning novel, Monika Maron says farewell to the East Germany where she grew up as the stepchild of an élite communist official not unlike retired Professor Beerenbaum, who hires disaffected writer Rosalind Polkowski to transcribe his memoirs. Shortly after the Berlin Wall, which Maron loathed, fell and her country disappeared, she returned home to write this subtle yet scathing look at herself living among the thinkers, drinkers, and elderly believers who kept the communist state going to the very end.Part argument with her father and cry of pain across the grave, part exploration of her own role and guilt as a follower in the GDR's sad funeral procession, Silent Close No. 6 has lost none of its depth of feeling, its power or its honesty.With her sharp feminist vision, Monika Maron spares neither foolish lovers, nor dilettantes, nor the upholders of state power - and certainly not herself.Here is essential reading to understand the Germany of yesterday, and also that of today."Icy prose." NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW"Maron writes with wit, economy and stylistic assurance." THE VILLAGE VOICE"One of the best writers of her generation." LE MONDE

The Ship of Fools has established Cristina Peri Rossi, author of a dozen other books of poetry and prose, as a leading writer in Europe and Latin America. This is her most important work in English and is recognized as a modern classic.The Ship of Fools subverts and reinvents the novel form, its characters, genders, and language, mixing fantasy and reality, medieval and modern. The wandering hero refuses to conform to an established order that can descend to the depths of militarism and machismo. The relationship between power and sex is posed in a series of ever more ambiguous events, dreams and riddles. All is resolved in the stunning climax that wittily overturns the traditional novel's progress of man and woman towards the marriage bed."A glorious mess, baffling and alluring . . . [an] exercise of mind and emotion that can make sense of the universe without reducing its complexity. That's hard to do, and that's what she's done." -The Village Voice"A journey around the world as kaleidoscope, ever changing, inquisitive." -El Pais (Madrid)"Biting satire . . . worthy of Gulliver's Travels." -Women's Review of Books

Monika Maron, the great German writer still today at the forefront of her creative generation, saw her country East Germany disappear in civil unrest, departures and finally the fall of the Berlin Wall.Maron in this novel looks inside Rosalind Polkowski, her semi-autobiographical heroine, exploring the freedom to be found within, despite the claustrophobic and threatening atmosphere of East German society contained by the Wall.Deeply psychological and always engaging, Monika Maron is an important European feminist voice, giving us an intimate view of a key moment in modern German history.

MONIKA MARON, today one of Germany's greatest living writers, created Flight of Ashes and the wonderfully feisty Josepha Nadler when she herself was struggling to leave East Germany, a struggle that involved her elite communist family, the STASI, her future career, and her own conscience.The young journalist's visit to the filthy industrial town of B Bitterfeld in the center of the GDR challenges her moral and political assumptions and plunges her into the personal and professional battle of her life.Today our horror at pollution is widespread, but in some of our own democratic societies and stripped of the old communist rhetoric, we are still asked like Josepha to look away, ignore the facts and the flue ash keep quiet and keep smiling.From the review in PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY:"e;A poignant tale of a woman's battle to be herself impatient, honest, emotional and a dreamer like her peasant grandfather in a society where people think and move like robots."e;

Caterina Albert i Paradís predates Federico García Lorca and D. H. Lawrence in her portrayal of women's sexual passions. She was an unsung pioneer of modernist literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, writing in the ancient Catalan language of Spain. Published under the nationalist (and necessarily male) pseudonym of Víctor Català, Solitude is regarded as the most important Catalan novel to appear before the Spanish Civil War.

"e;I had fallen into the situation [of previous Polish exiles] if not their role. In this unfortunate trap I found one ally most helpful: London itself. In those days it still held to its foggy tradition.... It isolated, snuggled and covered."e; from Beech BoatIt is 1945 in London, a city of wanderers. Warsaw is in ruins, Lwow is in another country, and London's Poles, with their long history of partition, resistance, and exile, are trying to understand how to live with genocide, Hiroshima, Katyn and the world's descent to ever lower circles of hell. The fall of Troy keeps coming to mind, and the few who managed to escape the ruins in their flimsy beech boats. Janina arrives in post-war London, tortured by memories of her girlhood and the war, and stalked by the generations of previous failed exiles whose worn tombstones she used to visit at home in the Jaslo cemetery. She finds a London teeming with other escapees, from the suicidal Nazi living next door to the stocky Mrs Kunegunda Grzesik, who has turned her practical hand to running a wildly successful ethnic restaurant. Janina joins the literary and political ferment around Wiadomosci, the emigre journal, and begins trying to earn a living from her art, making jewelry and painting porcelain at the Decorative Studio. She encounters her English neighbour, who shares his milk ration with her and tries to share his fervent belief in socialism, with which she has cruel previous experiences from Soviet-occupied Lwow. She is commissioned to produce a frieze of painted tiles for another Englishman in Ealing, an attractively mysterious sophisticate with an intriguing painting on his wall of The Temptation of Eve. Walking home through blitzed London in the fog, Janina has a Faustian encounter with another devil who resembles a portrait remembered from her father's old study. Dreamlike, lyrical and philosophical, mixing memory, drama and deep feeling, this prize-winning European women's memoir bring all these themes together in a convincing and powerful whole that has remained popular with Poles abroad and in the post-Solidarity nation at home, where Janina Koscialkowska's works were only able to be published when she was 77 years old.

From Angola - scene of one of southern Africa's longest and bitterest colonial struggles - comes the refreshing comedy of "Mestre" Tamoda. The archetypal bush lawyer, mock rhetorician and speechifier, Tamoda is the creation of Uanhenga Xitu, one of Angola's most revered writers and a revolutionary leader imprisoned for more than a decade by the Portuguese.Tamoda was conceived in a colonial prison, but his continuing adventures go beyond the absurdities of white rule, touching on the split between rural and urban life and the rapidly deteriorating African landscape. These rich narratives, innovative in their mix of languages, evoke the colonial past and troubled present in southern Africa, but transcend them with liberating laughter.

Playing on the rich Latin American literary tradition of the Saint's Life, Cuban writer Mireya Robles creates a humorous, ultimately horrifying vision of the nuclear family in HAGIOGRAPHY OF NARCISA THE BEAUTIFUL -- a text innovative in its style and even more in its exploration of homosexuality, lesbianism, and the destructive power of traditional gender and family roles. The philandering father, the sensitive yet sadistic older brother, the mother living on radio soap operas, the pretty, empty-headed younger sister - all are seen through the eyes of Narcisa, the relentlessly optimistic and ecstatic ugly duckling of her family. Narcisa's imagination both endows and parodies her surroundings with rich comedy and grotesqueness. "e;Satirical, darkly comic novel set in 1950s Cuba...explores inequality inherent in gender roles and oppression of women in Cuban society. Excellent text for women's studies classes."e;HANDBOOK OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES This abrasive and lively novel memorably analyses...a hilariously dysfunctional family.KIRKUS REVIEWS

To mark the 1985 fortieth anniversary of the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the distinguished members of the Japan P.E.N. Center -- led by Kenzaburo Oe -- planned and Readers International helped issue this first ever collection in English showing the tragedy of the A-bombs seen through Japanese eyes. Now it is the 75th anniversary of the same catastrophic events, and the state of world tensions today demands a re-issue of this classic volume so that a new generation of readers can experience first hand those tragic events and imagine their consequences in Japanese society for generations after. The classic stories are here, The Crazy Iris by Masuji Ibuse (masterfully translated by Ivan Morris), as well as the works by Tamiki Hara, Summer Flowers and The Land of Heart's Desire. They were censored under the post-war American occupation, but today are familiar to every Japanese schoolchild. The volume also showcases important Japanese women writers of several generations like Yoko Ota, Ineko Sata, Kyoko Hayashi and Hiroko Takenishi. Their stories touch on the especially bitter curse for women who were exposed to the radiation as young girls, then were rejected by a traditional society because of their infertility. These stories bring us the gift of great fiction -- they allow us to engage deeply with the past, but also to imagine its consequences in an uncertain future.

A three-day wake in Manila mourning the aged playboy Don Severino Gil is the setting for social satire and personal awakening. Unusually, his coffin is closed. Why?Among the powerful Gil family of doctors, lawyers, socialites, priests, businessmen as well as the rare student dissident speculation grows rife, but soon moves on to the topic of the Pope's planned visit to the Philippines. Religion, death, and the harsh realities of martial law crowd around them.Among the mourners are two isolated people struggling to find themselves: Don Severino's favourite niece Telly, a 49-year-old divorcée with a penchant for poetry and a tendency to suicide, and Sevi, the dead man's son, a middle-aged priest who works in the slums but doubts his vocation.If the coffin is opened, who will have the courage to look inside?