Best Spanish & Portuguese Literary Criticism

Unfurling like a medieval book of days, each page of Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days has an illuminating story that takes inspiration from that date of the calendar year, resurrecting the heroes and heroines who have fallen off the historical map, but whose lives remind us of our darkest hours and sweetest victories. His writing is full of candour, empathy, humane concern and also predictable convictions Herein lies Galeano's central appeal: he evokes the marvels of a remarkable world that is not so bad after all.” Financial Times “The stories themselves, broken into pieces, present both Galeano's aesthetic and his view of history. The impact of this literary approach to the history of violent disappearances is a lasting and universal one.” The Independent (UK). Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, generosity and greed-all are juxtaposed to great effect.... [T]his is a heady portrait of the human story rendered in broad, though no less incisive and affecting, strokes." Children of the Days , his Calendar of Human History, is an immensely varied gathering of facts and oddments and truths and stories of every kind. He keeps me morally awake, while also lifting my spirits with his ability to reveal in story-form the deep, sweet humanity which rebounds even after the cruelest moments of history. Reading Galeano, I'm often reminded of Joseph Conrad's claims for what writing should do: 'art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.'. "It's May, but this is a Christmas kind of a book: giftable, covetable, hefty, handsome, a veritable plum pudding of a thing, its lovely midnight-blue cover designed to look as though dotted with stars, or perhaps dusted with sugar, and slathered all over with generous custardy recommendations from both Philip Pullman and John Berger... Galeano chronicles events and anniversaries from the history of oppressed nations, adding the odd dash of fictional fun and philosophical musing... "Galeano's genre is his own - a mixture of fiction, journalism and history that, as always, is conveyed in orderly fragments of various sizes and is best understood as an outgrowth of his first midteen self-expressions as a socialist cartoonist. If you think of every short individual Galeano piece in the mammoth collection of them that comprises his life's work as a kind of verbal cartoon - or a set of variations on a verbal cartoon - then you understand both the striking singularity of his work and its innovation...Galeano's fire is unquenched.

First published in 1900, Dom Casmurro , widely considered Machado de Assis's greatest novel and a classic of Brazilian literature, is a brilliant retelling of the classic adultery tale―a sad and darkly comic novel about love and the corrosive power of jealousy. Praise for author Machado de Assis. In his books, in their most comic moments, he underlines the suffering by making us laugh.

This book is about how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world. “Egginton shines in his literary analysis, teasing out Cervantes’s genius in accessible prose and showing how Don Quixote paved the way for modern fiction by exploring its characters’ inner lives . "William Egginton has written an engaging and enlightening book on the pivotal role of Miguel de Cervantes in the development of western literature. Egginton presents Cervantes as an author of rare compassion, a man whose tempestuous, difficult life was somehow essential to forging his transcendent creation, the inseparable duo of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose bond of friendship upends the cruel conventions of sixteenth-century picaresque novels in order to rejoice in the power of individual conviction. Told with great panache, William Egginton’s presentation combines a unique understanding of Cervantes’s life, art, times, and the cultural debates that shaped his revolutionary fiction. ―Marina S. Brownlee, Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and author of THE POETICS OF LITERARY THEORY IN LOPE AND CERVANTES. " The Man who Invented Fiction is a wonderful reflection on the impact of life on literature and literature on life, a poetic and evocative meditation that succeeds at offering a detailed and nuanced look at the Spain of Cervantes. "Egginton's book is not simply a new interpretation of Miguel de Cervantes's fundamental text; it is also a new interpretation of his life and epoch as central to understanding how he invented what we now call fiction. It is an invitation to deeply immerse oneself into the early seventeenth century world of a veteran from the Spanish crown's imperial wars; and as this veteran is Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote , the reader re-emerges from that past made present with a graspable but fully developed philosophy of what it is all about to engage in fiction under the conditions of Modernity." "William Egginton offers a brilliant synthesis of the life and work of Miguel de Cervantes as he paints the engaging story of the birth of modern fiction and, in turn, of modern thought. History, politics, philosophy, and literature are beautifully combined in this ingenious exploration of Cervantes’ historical actuality, technical prowess, and artistic literary invention, as Egginton brings the author’s full story up to date and convincingly argues for its splendid vitality." ―Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish, Yale University, and author of LAW AND HISTORY IN CERVANTES'S DON QUIXOTE.

Authentic and updated -- nearly one third of the maps are new, and the text is fully revised -- the atlas illuminates the enchanted world created in THE SILMARILLION, THE HOBBIT, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Karen Wynn Fonstad is a qualified geographer and cartographer who first mapped Middle-Earth in 1981 and has since added much new detail based on those endless volumes of drafts, abandoned passages, alternative versions, and laundry lists published since Tolkien's death.

"On what slender threads do life and fortune hang" Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. Robin Buss (1939–2006) was a writer and translator who worked for the Independent on Sunday and as television critic for the Times Educational Supplement .

The characteristics, behavior, habits, and habitats of gnomes are pictured and described in a complete survey of gnome life, gnome history, and gnome lore. Text: English, Dutch (translation).

A #1 international bestseller in the vein of Fredrik Bachman's A Man Called Ove. : an irresistible, funny, charming, and tender-hearted tale about friendship, love, and an old man who is young at heart. A bestselling phenomenon that has captured imaginations around the world, The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen is inspiring, charming, and laugh-out-loud funny with a deep and poignant core: a page-turning delight for readers of any age.

This is the first volume of a new prose translation of Dante's epic - the first in twenty-five years. 'This new edition of Inferno is distinctly user-friendly....Serious students-in or out of the classroom-who...examine the original poem alongside a readable and reliable prose translation will find this edition excellently suited to their needs.'. 'Like the Inferno edition that preceded it, the Durling-Martinez Purgatorio, with its beautiful translation and superb apparatus of notes, is simply the best edition of Dante's second canticle in English. --David Young, translator of The Poetry of Petrarch "Durling and Martinez deliver Paradiso in elegant English prose faithful to Dante's Italian. --Michael Wyatt, author of The Italian Encounter with Tudor England "At the end of his poem Dante claims that his 'high imagining failed of power,' but Durling and Martinez have suffered no such fate in completing their translation of the Divine Comedy .

Included are a detailed map of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, selections from Dostoevsky’s notebooks and letters, and a crucial passage from an early draft of his novel. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and many other novels.