Awash in small-town gossip, petty jealousy, and intrigues, Manuel Puig's Heartbreak Tango is a comedic assault on the fault lines between the disappointments of the everyday world, and the impossible promises of commercials, pop songs, and movies. This melancholy and hilarious tango concerns the many women in orbit around Juan Carlos Etchepare, an impossibly beautiful Lothario wasting away ever-so-slowly from consumption, while those who loved and were spurned by him move on into workaday lives and unhappy marriages. Part elegy, part melodrama, and part dirty joke, this wicked and charming novel demonstrates Manuel Puig's mastery of both the highest and lowest forms of life and culture.

George Eliot wrote that "man cannot do without the make-believe of a beginning." Beginnings, it turns out, can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres. The international and interdisciplinary scope of these essays, representing every major theoretical perspective--including feminist, cognitive, postcolonial, postmodern, rhetorical, ethnic, narratological, and hypert.

This is the first biography, now available in paperback, of Manuel Puig (1932-1990), Argentinian author of Kiss of the Spider Woman and pioneer of high camp. Suzanne Jill Levine, his principal English translator, draws upon years of friendship as well as copious research and interviews

The author describes how, after she divorced her cheating husband, tango lessons taught her about love and loss; how to follow and how to lead; and how to live with style and flair, take risks and sort out what you really want, in a book that also explores the culture, history, music, moves and beauty of the Argentine tango. Original.

Approaching her dreaded thirtieth birthday, Marina Palmer suddenly found herself adrift in anxiety. A successful but bored advertising executive -- on the therapist's couch thrice weekly and with no lasting love in her life -- she longed for true passion and adventure. Then, on a whimsical vacation to South America, at a steamy two A.M. milonga, she found what she was looking for: tango! From her very first close-up glimpse of Argentina's signature dance she fell head over heels. She left everything behind -- her fast-track career, her desperate search for "the One" -- to pursue her new obsession in Buenos Aires, seeking a dancing partner, storybook love, and the tango lessons that might ultimately help her to earn a place on the professional circuit. In Kiss & Tango, Marina Palmer chronicles in no-holds-barred diary-style confessions her exhilarating misadventures on the Argentine dance floor . . . and beyond. An inspiring, outrageous, and unforgettable true story bursting with passion, adventure, romance, heartbreak, and steamy sex, it is the ideal book for anyone who secretly dreams of taking that one sweet, impossible gamble of a lifetime.

Since Prosper Mérimée and Georges Bizet (with his librettists Meilhac and Halévy) brought the figure of the Spanish Carmen to prominence in the nineteenth century an astonishing eighty or so film versions of the story have been made. This collection of essays gathers together a unique body of scholarly critique focused on that Carmen narrative in film. It covers the phenomenon from a number of aspects: cultural studies, gender studies, studies in race and representation, musicology, film history, and the history of performance. The essays take us from the days of silent film to twenty-first century hip-hop style, showing, through a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives that, despite social and cultural transformations—particularly in terms of gender, sexuality and race—remarkably little has changed in terms of basic human desires and anxieties, at least as they are represented in this body of films. The conception of Carmen’s independent sexuality as a source of danger both to men (and occasionally women) and to respectable society has been a constant. Nor has sexual and ethnic otherness lost its appeal. On the other hand, the corpus of Carmen films is more than a simple recycling of stereotypes and each engages newly with the social and cultural issues of their time.

Juan Carlos, a self-styled ladies' man, is dying of tuberculosis. The four women in his life keep watch over him: his doting mother, his vigilant, protective sister, and the two current loves of his life--one a portrait of purity, the other as wicked as she is seductive.They all bemoan Juan's cruel destiny, and their devotion to him is so encompassing that their own lives are forgotten in the shadow of his decline.