Repeatedly imprisoned for his printed attacks on the Spanish administration, Mexican journalist and publisher José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi attempted, in 1816, to make an end-run around government censors by disguising his invective as serial fiction. Lizardi's experiment in subterfuge quickly failed: Spanish officials shut down publication of the novel -- the first to be published in Latin America -- after the third installment, and within four years Lizardi was back in jail. The whole of The Mangy Parrot (El Periquillo Sarniento) went unpublished until after Lizardi's death -- and a decade after Mexico had won its independence from Spain. Though never before published in its entirety in English, The Mangy Parrot has become a Mexican classic beloved by generations of Latin American readers. Now, in vibrant American idiom, translator David Frye captures the exuberance of Lizardi's tale-telling as the author follows his narrator and alter ego, Periquillo Sarniento, through a series of misadventures that exposes the ignorance and corruption plaguing Mexican society on the eve of the wars for independence. Raw descriptions of colonial street life, candid portraits of race and ethnicity, and barely camouflaged attacks on colonial authority fill this comic masterpiece of world literature -- the Don Quixote of Latin America.

Repeatedly imprisoned for his printed attacks on the Spanish administration, Mexican journalist and publisher José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi attempted, in 1816, to make an end-run around government censors by disguising his invective as serial fiction. Lizardi's experiment in subterfuge quickly failed: Spanish officials shut down publication of the novel--the first to be published in Latin America--after the third installment, and within four years Lizardi was back in jail. The whole of The Mangy Parrot (El Periquillo Sarniento) went unpublished until after Lizardi's death--and a decade after Mexico had won its independence from Spain. Though never before published in its entirety in English, The Mangy Parrot has become a Mexican classic beloved by generations of Latin American readers. Now, in vibrant American idiom, translator David Frye captures the exuberance of Lizardi's tale-telling as the author follows his narrator and alter ego, Periquillo Sarniento, through a series of misadventures that exposes the ignorance and corruption plaguing Mexican society on the eve of the wars for independence. Raw descriptions of colonial street life, candid portraits of race and ethnicity, and barely camouflaged attacks on colonial authority fill this comic masterpiece of world literature--the Don Quixote of Latin America.

David Frye's abridgment of his 2003 translation of The Mangy Parrot captures all of the narrative drive, literary innovation, and biting social commentary that established Lizardi's comic masterpiece as the Don Quixote of Latin America.

The curious tale of two priest impersonators in late colonial Mexico Cut loose from their ancestral communities by wars, natural disasters, and the great systemic changes of an expanding Europe, vagabond strangers and others out of place found their way through the turbulent history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. As shadowy characters inspiring deep suspicion, fascination, and sometimes charity, they prompted a stream of decrees and administrative measures that treated them as nameless threats to good order and public morals. The vagabonds and impostors of colonial Mexico are as elusive in the written record as they were on the ground, and the administrative record offers little more than commonplaces about them. Fugitive Freedom locates two of these suspect strangers, Joseph Aguayo and Juan Atondo, both priest impersonators and petty villains in central Mexico during the last years of Spanish rule. Displacement brought pícaros to the forefront of Spanish literature and popular culture—a protean assortment of low life characters, seen as treacherous but not usually violent, shadowed by poverty, on the move and on the make in selfish, sometimes clever ways as they navigated a hostile, sinful world. What to make of the lives and longings of Aguayo and Atondo, which resemble those of one or another literary pícaro? Did they imagine themselves in literary terms, as heroes of a certain kind of story? Could impostors like these have become fixtures in everyday life with neither a receptive audience nor permissive institutions? With Fugitive Freedom, William B. Taylor provides a rare opportunity to examine the social histories and inner lives of two individuals at the margins of an unfinished colonial order that was coming apart even as it was coming together.

This compact anthology—the second volume in Margaret L. King's masterful introduction to the Western literary tradition—offers, in whole or in part, eighty key literary works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The texts provided here represent an unusually broad array of languages and traditions, ranging across a variety of genres such as verse, drama, philosophy, short- and long-form fiction, and non-fiction (including autobiography, speech, journalism, and essay). This second volume shares with the first a focus on works by women; numerous texts by Latin American writers are included here as well. King's clear, engaging introductions and notes support an informed reading of the texts while extending students’ knowledge of particular authors and problems of interest. The Western Literary Tradition's modest length and cost allow for the use of full-length works—many of which are available in Hackett Publishing’s own well-regarded and inexpensive translations and editions—alongside the anthology without adding undue cost to a student’s total textbook fees.

Spanning the whole of Latin America, including Brazil, from its beginnings in 1492 up to the present time, Rivera-Barnes and Hoeg analyze the relationship between literature and the environment in both literary and testimonial texts, asking questions that contribute to the on-going dialogue between the arts and the sciences.

"A bawdy tale of colonial Mexico, a merciless political satire, a kaleidoscope of Mexican society in the twilight of Spanish rule ..."--Back cover.