The image of the hard-boiled private investigator from gritty pulp fiction, a terse and mysterious figure, has become increasingly universal as the detective novel crosses more and more borders. A booming genre in Latin America, Spain and other Hispanic cultures, detective fiction has transcended the limitations of its influences. Hispanic authors relatively new to the genre have published novels and series popular with the public, while a number of well-known writers have adapted the genre to reflect the concurrent globalization of modern society and the crimes within it. This volume presents a compilation of 11 critical essays on genero negro--contemporary detective fiction in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian canon. Surveying the last twenty years, the text analyzes emerging trends in this rapidly evolving genre, as well as the mutations and innovations taking place within the style. The first section of the book is dedicated to the detective fiction of Spain and Portugal. The second section surveys works from Latin America and the United States, where topics touch on universal subjects like crime, identity and feminism.

This volume examines Latin American literature in the context of a complimentary audiovisual culture dominated by mass media such as photography, film, and the Internet. The articles gathered here, all of them published for the first time, critically assess Latin American media theories (Garcia Canclini et al.), pointing out their strengths and shortcomings; show how literary works have been able to sustain their visibility in a highly competitive media ecology, accommodating to pop and mass culture while at the same time reaffirming the authority of the literary intellectual. Overall, the book's foregrounding of the impact of mass media on Latin American literature opens the critical debate on an increasingly essential subject.

The Right in the Americas discusses the origins, development, and current state of conservative and right-wing movements in ten countries in the Americas. The growth of the right is one of the most important issues of the moment in global politics. Within the context of democracy erosion, rejection of traditional politics, and economic uncertainty, right and extreme-right actors are capable of offering misguided answers and hope to a significant part of a country’s population, who will trust their promises and bring them to power with their vote. This dynamic has repeated itself in an astonishingly consistent pattern across the Americas. This book analyses eight Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela - along with Canada and the United States, two G7 countries. It demonstrates that conservatism is in fact a hemispheric phenomenon, promoted and invigorated by the regional hegemon—the United States of America—both as government and as civil society. Beyond this regional scope, the peculiarities of each case study are explored in detail, providing solid historical background, while at the same time uncovering their commonalities and cross-pollination. This study will be of great interest to scholars of conservatism, right-wing politics, comparative politics, and North American and Latin American politics.

Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) was the most prominent novelist in contemporary Mexico and, until his recent death, one of the leading voices in Latin America’s Boom generation. He received the most prestigious awards and prizes in the world, including the Latin Civilization Award (presented by the Presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and France), the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award. During his fecund and accomplished life as a writer, literary theorist, and political analyst, Fuentes turned his attention to the major conflicts of the twentieth century – from the Second World War and the Cuban Revolution, to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in Vietnam, and the post-revolutionary crisis of the one-party rule in Mexico – and attended to their political and international importance in his novels, short fiction, and essays. Known for his experimentation in narrative techniques, and for novels and essays written in a global range that illuminate the conflicts of our times, Fuentes’s writings have been rightfully translated into most of the world’s languages. His literary work continues to spur and provoke the interest of a global readership on diverse civilizations and eras, from Imperial Spain and post-revolutionary France, to Ancient and Modern Mexico, the United States, and Latin America. The Reptant Eagle: Essays on Carlos Fuentes and the Art of the Novel includes nineteen essays and one full introduction written exclusively for this volume by renowned Fuentes scholars from Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Collected into five parts, the essays integrate wide-ranging methods and innovative readings of The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975) and, among other novels, Distant Relations (1980); they analyze the visual arts in Fuentes’s novels (Diego Rivera’s murals and world film); chart and comment on the translations of Fuentes’s narratives into Japanese and Romanian; and propose comprehensive readings of The Buried Mirror (1992) and Personas (2012), Fuentes’s posthumous book of essays. Beyond their comprehensive and interdisciplinary scope, the book’s essays trace Fuentes’s conscious resolve to contribute to the art of the novel and to its uninterrupted tradition, from Cervantes and Rabelais to Thomas Mann and Alejo Carpentier, and from the Boom generation to Latin America’s “Boomerang” group of younger writers. This book will be of importance to literary critics, teachers, students, and readers interested in Carlos Fuentes’s world-embracing literary work.

A comprehensive, encyclopedic guide to the authors, works, and topics crucial to the literature of Central and South America and the Caribbean, the Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature includes over 400 entries written by experts in the field of Latin American studies. Most entries are of 1500 words but the encyclopedia also includes survey articles of up to 10,000 words on the literature of individual countries, of the colonial period, and of ethnic minorities, including the Hispanic communities in the United States. Besides presenting and illuminating the traditional canon, the encyclopedia also stresses the contribution made by women authors and by contemporary writers. Outstanding Reference Source Outstanding Reference Book

Antes de nacer somos como una cajita vacía. Luego la cajita se va llenando con la luz que nos hace ser como somos. La Cajita Vacía es una obra pictórica/filosófica, para niños, jóvenes y adultos, que combina perfectamente imágenes y texto, y plantea respuestas simples a preguntas muy complejas, como... ¿Qué es Dios? ¿Qué es la buena suerte? ¿Por qué los niños mueren? ¿Cómo podemos hablar con Dios? ¿Quién tiene la culpa si nos va mal? ¿Por qué cada persona tiene un Dios? ¿Cómo sabemos que Él nos escucha? ¿Y cómo Dios sabe tanto de nosotros? ¿Las personas que sufren tienen Dios? ¿Por qué Dios no evita el sufrimiento y la pobreza?

The story that unfolds in Memorias del Sanatorio has its beginnings in the mental vortex that engulfs Arnaldo Morales after the suicide of his father. There is no possible resurrection after that fact,and our main character is hospitalized in a quirky mental sanatorioum in Spain, where the sons and daughters of well to do in Latin American families, as well as of the Spanish bourgeois, are hospitalized with the hope of some miraculous cure of their mental illness from which they will continue to suffer in the clinic, year after year, in the hallways and the rooms of the Esquerdo The characters that inhabit these halls of the asylum are markedly interesting in their contorted psychologies, in their delusional systems, in the inventions of the imaginations that lead them somewhere that they do not remotely expect: the end of their shadows past the gray walls, the corridors they follow going nowhere through the center of the despair of their schizophrenias: the end of their delusions that do not provide with a way out. The writer has gotten his material for the novel from his own experience as he walked these corridors, and the streets that appear in the narrative; and of course from the experience of mental illness. One more important aspect of the narrative: The narrator find himself in the streets of Miami Beach throughout the novel, from where he recollects the thirty years past when the remembrances from the sanatorium took place. The world is going to end, like it happens in the end of every millennium, and a new imperator comes to MB to witnesses the executions of the insane.